Editorial in the Telegraph: Remember those who fought in the Great War
It is hard to think of an event since the Reformation that changed the civilised world so much as the Great War, in which the guns fell silent 90 years ago today.
Almost every aspect of the world in which we now live was shaped by that conflict. It can be seen as only the first act in a drama that lasted until 1945: but the world after the Versailles Treaty, that saw the rise of Nazism and the Axis, was made by the concatenation of events that started in Sarajevo in June 1914.
To take an even longer view, the war can be seen as the pivotal point in a sequence that began with Bismarck's orchestration of Prussia's defeat of Austria-Hungary in 1866, and finished with the dismantling of the Berlin Wall in 1989.
It was not merely Nazism and the Second World War that were its issue: so too were the Russian Revolution and the enslavement of eastern Europe under Stalin after 1945.
So too were the many socio-economic changes in Europe after 1918: the end of empire, the emancipation of women, the advance of welfarism, the century of the common man, and the increasingly rapid progress of technology.
Never had there been such a quantum leap in attitudes, relationships, the social order and way of life.
Yet the overriding memory we still carry of the Great War - and especially on Armistice Day - is of slaughter, sacrifice and suffering.
It brought misery and destruction not merely to whole societies and civilisations, but to millions of individuals who lost their lives, and to tens of millions of their wives, children, parents and comrades.
The sight of the vast cemeteries at Tyne Cot, Arras or Vimy Ridge has lost none of its power to move, even when only three of our fellow Britons from the conflict remain alive...
Read entire article at Telegraph (UK)
Almost every aspect of the world in which we now live was shaped by that conflict. It can be seen as only the first act in a drama that lasted until 1945: but the world after the Versailles Treaty, that saw the rise of Nazism and the Axis, was made by the concatenation of events that started in Sarajevo in June 1914.
To take an even longer view, the war can be seen as the pivotal point in a sequence that began with Bismarck's orchestration of Prussia's defeat of Austria-Hungary in 1866, and finished with the dismantling of the Berlin Wall in 1989.
It was not merely Nazism and the Second World War that were its issue: so too were the Russian Revolution and the enslavement of eastern Europe under Stalin after 1945.
So too were the many socio-economic changes in Europe after 1918: the end of empire, the emancipation of women, the advance of welfarism, the century of the common man, and the increasingly rapid progress of technology.
Never had there been such a quantum leap in attitudes, relationships, the social order and way of life.
Yet the overriding memory we still carry of the Great War - and especially on Armistice Day - is of slaughter, sacrifice and suffering.
It brought misery and destruction not merely to whole societies and civilisations, but to millions of individuals who lost their lives, and to tens of millions of their wives, children, parents and comrades.
The sight of the vast cemeteries at Tyne Cot, Arras or Vimy Ridge has lost none of its power to move, even when only three of our fellow Britons from the conflict remain alive...