By 1914 Europe worshipped an idol it did not see — faith in unstoppable progress. The age of science and machines had convinced it that humanity was moving from victory to victory, that civilization had reached maturity, and that a great war between enlightened nations was impossible and simply unprofitable. Into this faith were mingled the cult of the nation and a rapture over technology. And when a single shot rang out in Sarajevo, ending the archduke's life, the mechanism of alliances and mobilizations tripped of its own accord — and millions of people became what the staffs called expendable material, "cannon fodder."
The catastrophe laid bare the underside of progress. The very technology that had promised paradise delivered the first industrial slaughter. The machine gun mowed down the ranks of attackers by the hundreds each minute; at Ypres in 1915 poison gas was released for the first time; artillery plowed the earth until no trace of a man remained. Verdun and the Somme became synonyms for a senseless meat grinder — on the very first day at the Somme, July 1, 1916, the British army lost more than 57,000 men. In all, the war took about ten million soldiers' lives. Progress turned into a conveyor belt of death.
The captivity was not only territorial but spiritual. The survivors returned as a "lost generation" — broken people for whom the old words about valor and reason rang false. Four empires collapsed — the Russian, the German, the Austro-Hungarian, the Ottoman. And the humiliating Peace of Versailles, which saddled defeated Germany with an unbearable guilt and unbearable reparations, sowed the bitterness out of which the next, still more terrible war would grow. The nineteenth century, which had believed in reason, died in the trenches.
And yet out of the ashes rose a sobering. The idol of progress was cast down — humanity saw how thin was the layer of civilization over the abyss, how easily a machine created for life serves death. The League of Nations was born — weak, doomed, but the first universal admission that the old order was dead and that the world could no longer be surrendered to the will of arms. The return here is not a triumph but a bitter clear-sightedness: the price paid in order to doubt one's own omnipotence.