Centennial of Start of World War I Observed

While I was listening to BBC America on my local Public Radio station (WUFT/89.1) as I worked the late-night shift on my job last night, there was a piece about the one hundred-year anniversary of the beginning of World War I.  According to the broadcast, on August 4, 1914, the German army launched its surprise invasion of then-neutral Belgium according to its Schliessen Plan to invade and conquer its main land foe France.  Great Britain, which had up to this point displayed remarkable restraint at staying out of the cascading conflict, had a treaty with Belgium that it then used to jump into the fray.  So for them, the "Great War", as it came to be known during its run of a little less than four and a half years, began with the Germans crossing over into Belgium.  For others, though, World War I began a week earlier, on July 28, when Austria-Hungary, responding to the Serbian nationalist assassination of its Archduke Ferdinand a month earlier, began its armed conflict with Serbia.  This is where the dominoes of entangled treaties and alliances had begun to fall, leading up to the German invasion in the Western theater.  For Russia supported Serbia against Austria, Germany supported Austria-Hungary and threatened Russia, France supported Russia and threatened Germany, and...well, you can see how it all ended up in such a huge mess.  However, in spite of how the war seemed to come about so spontaneously, in fact the Germans had been carefully planning for such a conflict for decades, studying various invasion plans and working out a system of lightning-fast mobilization and transportation of its troops through its railway system.  It could be that this war, in one form or another, was inevitable given the militarism of the German Empire and its conflicting national interests with Britain and France that were on a global scale...

World War II was by far the most devastating and costly war in history, both for its global nature and for the degree to which civilians were victimized.  But for military combat casualties, World War I with its trench warfare and ill-fated frontal charges, particularly in the Battle of the Somme in 1916, was the ultimate nightmare of human existence, with the concentrated carnage and horror on a scale that could never have been imagined....and which hasn't since been matched.  Imagine having been a British soldier in the trenches on that fateful morning of July 1, 1916 in northern France and having to go over the top into "no-man's land" straight into the fire of the waiting Germans.  Nearly twenty thousand British soldiers were killed outright on the first day of battle!

What a tragic waste of a generation of young men, wiped out on the battlefield in this pointless war...