The First World War, for a while known as the Great War, was the biggest slaughter that humanity had achieved. Until the next world war that began a couple of decades later.
Rounded to nearest millions, the "butcher's bill" for that war was staggering: 8.6 million dead, 21.2 million wounded. And that figure for the dead doesn't count the six million civilians killed.
The good old time of peace - For the parents, grandparents and great-grandparents of the Europeans living today, the years before 1914 were the good old time of peace. Many people on the Old Continent had greeted the new centurty with booming optimism. They believed in a golden future with more freedom, progress and prosperity.
The First World War destroyed this trust irreplaceably. Millions of men [sic] experienced and erlitten violence of such massive brutality that previously in the history of humanity had been unimaginable - an ideal breeding ground for fascists and communists ...
- Claus Wiegrefe, "Der Marsch in die Barbarei, " Spiegel Special 1/2004. My translation.
The very industrial, scientific and material progress that was the basis of such booming optimism became the effective instruments of its destruction:
The industrial dynamic which had allowed the Europeans to become the rulers of the world [i.e., through colonialism] turned itself for the first time againsst the inhabitants of the Old Continent. The First World War was the first total war. The raiload - symbol of progress - carried millions of soldiers to the front; there they became part of a gigantic, high-tech killing machinery of a previously unknown scale.
Terror weapons like the "Paris cannon" flung their deadly burden over a distance of 130 kilometers; machine guns of the American brand Maxim fired up to 600 bullets per minute. On September 12, 1918 alone, the Americans fired 1.1 million shells in an attack in four hours.
More than 60 million soldiers from five continents fought between China and the Falkland Islands, at nearly 4000 meter heights and in the depths of the Atlantic Ocean for victory and for their lives. According to estimates by the authors of the standard work Enzykopädie Erster Weltkrieg, nearly one in six fell - on the average 6000 men daily. Millions returned home as war-disabled.
The British writer Wilfred Trotter gave expression to this disillusionment in his Instincts of the Herd in Peace and War (1919 edition), a book on which Sigmund Freud relied heavily in his own study, Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego:
The foregoing considerations are enough, perhaps, to make one wonder whether, after all, Western civilization may not be about to follow its unnumbered predecessors into decay and dissolution. There can be no doubt that such a suspicion is oppressing many thoughtful minds at the present time. It is not likely to be dispelled by the contemplation of history or by the nature of recent events. Indeed, the view can be maintained very plausibly that all civilizations must tend ultimately to break down, that they reach sooner or later a period when their original vigour is worn out, and then collapse through internal disruption or outside pressure. It is even believed by some that Western civilization already shows the evidences of decline which in its predecessors have been the forerunners of destruction. When we remember that our very short period of recorded history includes the dissolution of civilizations so elaborate as those of the Chaldeans, the Assyrians, the Egyptians, and of the Incas, that a social structure so complex as that but lately disclosed in Crete could leave no trace in human memory but a faint and dubious whisper of tradition, and that the dawn of history finds civilization already old, we can scarcely resist the conclusion that social life has, more often than one can bear to contemplate, swung laboriously up to a meaningless apogee and then lapsed again into darkness. Weknow enough of man to be aware that each of these unnumbered upward movements must have been infinitely painful, must have been at least as fruitful of torture, oppression, and anguish as the ones of which we know the history, and yet each was no more than the swing of a pendulum and a mere fruitless oscillation landing man once more at his starting point, impoverished and broken, with perhaps more often than not no transmissible vestige of his greatness.
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