The War to End All Wars......

The world had seen nothing like it, and it was the hope of the survivors that their war was the "war to end all wars". This hope was dashed even before the Armistice, because the Great War-as its participants called it, in awed honour of its bloody magnitude-had let roll events which ripple to this day. Out of the four-year-conflict came the Russian Revolution, the rise of Hitler, the Second World War, the decline of Britain, the supremacy of America and the instability of the Middle East (even the 2003 Gulf War can be tracked back to the mandate over Iraq given to Britain at the 1919 Peace Conference). World War I the Forgotten War! Pictured above is the largest American World War I Cemetery at Romagne sous Montfaucon in north east France where over 14000 soldiers are laid to rest.

World War I... The Forgotton War...

I have just finished reading “The Mammoth Book of Eyewitness World War I” with over 180 first-hand accounts of the “war to end all wars”. I didn’t realize the magnitude of the war because it’s been nearly 90 years since it was fought and almost all of the participants are deceased. Has it become the Forgotten War? Despite the haunting images of Flanders’ trenches with “solders bent double like sacks”, the fighting was not confined to a corner of northwest Europe, but took in eastern and southern Europe, the Middle East, Africa, and even China and Japan. Fifty million men from thirty nations donned uniforms. When the last bullet sounded on 11 November 1918, nine million of the combatants lay dead, alongside five million citizens. It has become the Forgotten War.