The Gravity of the First World War

Last year was the one hundredth anniversary of the beginning of the First World War. The Nineteenth century did not close with the coming of 1900; it came crashing down in the abyss that was the First World War. The politics of that prior century extended into the next, the 20th, and brought about the great cataclysm of that war.  Trench warfare was a horror beyond imagination. The trenches of that war were Europe digging its grave. The culture of a thousand years died in that war. The greatest iconoclastic shocks came in or because of that war. It was The First World War that gave Bolshevism its edge and gave birth in the aftermath to Nazism.