Transcription
Where did it all go wrong? You hear it everywhere. From your grandparents, from your parents, from people in pubs and comment sections and barber shops across Britain and America and Germany and France. This feeling that something has been lost, that modern life is missing something the previous generations had. That the world has become uglier and smaller and less serious than it used to be.
Look around you. The buildings going up today versus the buildings built a 100 years ago. The civic architecture of Victorian and Eduwardian Britain. The town halls, the libraries, the railway stations, the museums, built to last for centuries built with the specific belief that beauty mattered and that the public deserved it. And then look at what we build now. Glass boxes, concrete blocks, buildings designed to be cheapest to construct rather than finest to inhabit. Nobody's going to travel to see the architecture of 2024 in a 100 years. Nobody is going to stand in front of it and feel anything.
All the culture, the music, the art, the literature, the specific sense that the culture being produced today does not reach the heights of what preceded it. Not nostalgia, not old people complaining that things were better when they were young. Something more specific, a genuine diminishment, the specific quality of a civilization that builds the Albert Hall and composes the Elgar variations and writes the novels of Hardy and Conrad. That quality is not present in the same way today, and people feel it even when they cannot articulate it.
People give different answers when you ask where it went wrong. Some say World War II, the destruction of European cities, the loss of tens of millions of Europeans in six years of industrial warfare that made even World War I look contained. The specific trauma that Europe collectively absorbed in the 1940s and never fully processed. The continent that emerged from 1945 was a broken thing trying to rebuild itself on ruins.
Some say the 1960s, the cultural revolution that dismantled the social frameworks, family, community, religion, shared purpose that had structured life for centuries without replacing them with anything equally stable.
Some say the 1980s and 1990s, the financialization of everything, the worship of markets, the specific period in which the logic of profit became the only logic allowed in public conversation.
All of these answers have something to them. All of them identify real moments of real damage. But some people, fewer and usually the ones who have thought about it longest and say it was the 1910s, that the specific rupture happened in the summer of 1914, in the weeks between the assassination of an arch duke in Sievo and the first shells falling on the Western Front. That everything that followed, the ugliness, the smallness, the loss of civilizational confidence flows from those weeks. I think they are right. And here is why.
In the summer of 1914, three of the most powerful men in the world were exchanging desperate personal telegrams trying to stop a war neither of them wanted. They called each other Willie, Nikki, and Georgie. Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany. Zar Nicholas II of Russia, King George V of Britain. First cousins, all three grandchildren of Queen Victoria, the woman Europeans called the grandmother of Europe because her nine children had married into virtually every royal house on the continent.
Wilhelm and George were first cousins. George and Nicholas were first cousins. Their mothers were sisters from the Danish royal family. They had grown up together, holidayed together, attended each other's weddings. Nicholas and George looked so alike that people who encountered them both mistook one for the other. And in July and August of 1914, they were writing to each other with increasing desperation in English, using their childhood nicknames, trying to stop the machinery they had set in motion from grinding into each other.
The Kaiser wrote, "An ignoble war has been forced on us. I am being pressed harder than ever. I hope that you will not let your army be used as a tool of England's and France's desire for revenge." Your loving cousin, Willie.
The Zar wrote, "An ignoble war has been started on a weak country. The indignation in Russia shared fully by me, is enormous. I foresee that very soon I shall be overwhelmed by the pressure forced upon me and be forced to take extreme measures which will lead to war. To try and avoid such a calamity as a European war, I beg you in the name of our old friendship, to do what you can to stop your allies from going too far." Nikki.
George wrote to Nikki, "I am most anxious that there should not be any mistake about England's attitude. It is impossible for me to act except on the advice of my ministers. You know, we should never have wanted this terrible war." Georgie.
The machinery moved faster than the letters. Germany declared war on Russia on August 1st, on France on August 3rd. Britain declared war on Germany on August 4th. By the time the last telegram had been exchanged, the trains were already moving. Millions of men were already marching. The Kaiser said afterward that if Queen Victoria were still alive, she would never have allowed it. He was probably right.
What followed was the greatest self-inflicted catastrophe in the history of European civilization. Not a war between different civilizations. Not a collision between different peoples with different religions and different ways of understanding the world. A family, the specific family that had built European civilization and sat at its peak, destroying itself, taking the finest young men it had produced and feeding them into the ground. And the world that exists today is the direct consequence of what those three cousins and the institutions behind them set in motion in the summer of 1914.
Now, let me show you what Europe was before World War I, because this part of the story is almost never told properly. The history always starts with the assassination of France Ferdinand in Sievo in June 1914. It almost never starts with what was destroyed.
The Victorian era (1837-1901) produced the Albert Hall, the Natural History Museum, the Houses of Parliament in their current form, the Great Railway Stations, Leedstown Hall, St. George's Hall in Liverpool. The grand civic architecture that you walk past in British cities today and cannot quite believe was built by human hands.
These were not government vanity projects. They were expressions of a civilization at the peak of its confidence. A civilization that built things to last for centuries because it believed it had centuries ahead of it. The Edwardian era that followed (1901-1914) was, in the words of historian Samuel Hines, a leisurely time when women wore picture hats, when the sun really never set on the British Empire, when the art and architecture and music and literature of the continent were at a standard that has arguably not been equaled since.
The great architect Edwin Lutians was producing buildings of extraordinary quality. Charles Renie Macintosh in Glasgow, the Vienna Secession, the Belle Époque in Paris, Wilhelmina. Germany was at the scientific and philosophical frontier of human knowledge, producing Einstein, Planck, Freud, the foundations of quantum physics and modern psychology simultaneously. Britain was producing Shaw, Wells, Kipling, Elgar. Europe was producing Mahler, Debussy, Puccini, Strauss.
The Edwardian era is often described as the pinnacle of Britain's influence on the world stage. The architect Francis Terry wrote that it produced John Singer Sargent representing the glamour of the age in virtuoso brushstrokes while Lutians and Belchure and Bloomfield captured the times in brick, marble and stone.
What happened to Lutians after World War I? He spent the rest of his career designing war memorials. The Cenotaph in Whitehall, the memorial to the missing of the Somme at Thiepval, a structure of extraordinary beauty built to honor the 72,195 men of the British and South African forces who died on the Somme between July 1st, 1916 and February 1917 and have no known grave. Lutians went from building the civilization to memorializing the civilization because the civilization that had employed him to build things had fed the men who would have used them into the mud of the Western Front.
Because this is the part of the history that never quite makes it into the school curriculum. The five great merchant banks of the City of London—Rothschilds, Baring's, Morgan's, Kleinwort's and Schroeder's—were at the center of European finance in 1914. They were involved in all the most daring and profitable investment ventures worldwide. London was the prime location for the financing of international trade, the extension of loans, the trade and foreign exchange.
When the war started, all sides needed money, vast, unprecedented amounts of money. Wars of this scale had never been fought before and had never been financed before. Every government involved discovered within months that their pre-war financial assumptions were completely wrong. The war was not going to be over by Christmas. It was going to last years and cost more than any of them had believed possible.
J.P. Morgan made the first loan of $12 million to Russia in 1914. In 1915, he made a loan of $50 million to the French government. He organized a syndicate of approximately 2,200 American banks and floated a loan of $500 million to the Allies. By 1917, the Morgans and Kuhn, Loeb & Company had floated a billion half dollars in loans to the Allies. Morgan also received the proceeds of the first American Liberty loan to pay off $400 million which he had advanced to Britain at the outbreak of the war.
The Rothschilds' agents, the Warburg banking house, were simultaneously financing Germany. Paul Warburg, a naturalized American who had been decorated by the Kaiser in 1912, was vice chairman of the Federal Reserve Board when America entered the war. The same network of financial families was on both sides of the conflict. This is not a conspiracy theory. These are documented historical facts.
The banks that financed the war collected interest on the loans for decades afterward. Germany's war reparations—132 billion marks—were only finally paid off in 2010, not 1945, not 1960, 2010. Nearly a century after the war ended, Germany was still making payments on debts incurred fighting it. The financial institutions that made those loans and earned that interest did not cease to exist. They did not give back the money. They invested it. They grew.
The men who went over the top at the Somme on July 1st, 1916, were dying for a war that was being financed on both sides by institutions in London and New York. Who would profit from the outcome regardless of which side won? Now, the Pals' battalions, because this is the specific mechanism by which the destruction reached into every community in Britain simultaneously.
In the summer of 1914, Lord Kitchener, the Secretary of State for War, needed men. Britain was the only major power without a large professional army, and he needed to build one quickly. The idea that emerged was the Pals' battalion. Men would be allowed to enlist with their friends, their neighbors, their colleagues, their workmates, with the promise that they could serve together. You would fight alongside the men you grew up with, the men from your street, the men from your factory, the men from your office.
It worked immediately. Within 2 days of the Earl of Derby announcing the first Pals' Battalion in Liverpool, 1,500 men had signed up. By the end of September 1914, more than 50 towns had formed Pals' battalions. Manchester raised four battalions in August and four more in November. The Grimsby Chums was formed by former schoolboys of Winteringham Secondary School. The 17th Battalion Middlesex Regiment was almost entirely made up of professional footballers. The first to join was Frank Buckley, who had played for Manchester United, Manchester City and the England national team. The Accrington Pals drew 1,100 men from Accrington, Burnley, Blackburn and Chorley.
They trained together. They shipped to France together. On the morning of July 1st, 1916, the first day of the Battle of the Somme, they went over the top together. They had been told that the week-long artillery bombardment preceding the attack had destroyed the German defensive positions. It had not. The German trenches were dug so deeply, and in some places 40 ft below the surface, that the men sheltering in them were largely unharmed. When the artillery stopped, the German soldiers emerged, set up their machine guns, and waited.
The British infantry had been ordered to walk at a steady pace. Each man was carrying approximately 66 lb of equipment, more than half his own body weight in many cases. It was physically impossible to move faster than a walk, impossible to rise and lie down quickly, impossible to react to what they encountered with the kind of speed that might have saved some of them. The German machine guns opened up. The men from Accrington and Leeds and Sheffield and Liverpool and Manchester and Birmingham walked into them.
Percy Holmes, the brother of one of the Accrington Pals, later said, "I don't think there was a street in Accrington and District that didn't have their blinds drawn, and the bell at Christ Church told all the day." The Leeds Pals, 504 of their 900 men, survived the first day. The Sheffield City Battalion, 495, dead and wounded in one day. One Lancashire Street lost nearly all its young men in a single day. Offices and factories found entire departments had been wiped out. Mothers received multiple telegrams simultaneously. Churches held funerals for brothers and cousins and neighbors all at once.
Think about what this meant in practice. In a single morning, in a single battle on a single stretch of French farmland, the young men of entire British communities were gone. Not just any young men, the ones who had volunteered first, the ones who had signed up together out of patriotism and camaraderie and adventure, the ones who had stood in the town square and marched to the recruiting station together and promised to serve alongside their friends. These were by definition the most community-connected, most motivated, most socially engaged young men in every town that formed a Pals' battalion. The specific men who would have built the next generation of those communities. The ones who would have become the fathers and the employers and the leaders and the builders of the next 30 years. They went over the top on July 1st, 1916, and they did not come back. And the communities they came from never quite recovered.
57,470 British casualties on that single day. 19,240 killed, the worst day in the history of the British army. And it was just one day of a war that lasted four more years after it.
Now, the voices from inside it, because nothing you can read in a history book prepares you for what the men who were there actually said. J.B. Priestley, the playwright, writing from the reserved trenches on January 1st, 1916. "At 1:00, the troops in the front line made two bomb attacks on the German front line, and we had to support them. For an hour, it was literally hell upon earth. I had to spend most of the time crouched in the mud by the side of a machine gun. It was going nearly all the time, and the noise nearly stunned me. Then, the sickly smell of cordite and the dense masses of steam from the water cooler. Both our artillery and theirs were going for all they were worth, and they lit up the sky. You could see some of the shells going through the air, swift red streaks. Then an incessant stream of bullets from both sides, bombs, trench mortars making a hellish din. And the sky lit up with a mad medley of shells, searchlights, star lights, the green and red rockets. Just about an hour of hell. And that was our introduction to the year of 1916."
A military chaplain: "My eyes are gluted with the sight of bleeding bodies and shattered limbs. My heart rung with the agony of wounded and dying men. It is pitiful to see the men suffering from gas. They lie, their eyes streaming, their bodies burnt and blistered and vomiting out their very souls."
A soldier writing home: "There is the awful smell of the trenches after an engagement. The smell of gunpowder and dead bodies and blood. It is a stench I shall never forget."
On the mud at Passchendaele: "The mud there wasn't liquid. It wasn't porridge. It was a curious kind of sucking kind of mud. When you got off the track with your load, it drew at you. Not like quicksand, but a real monster that sucked at you. Men drowning in shell holes already filled with decaying flesh as the bullets flew around them."
A soldier on the rats: "I saw some rats running from under the dead men's great coats. Enormous rats fat with human flesh."
Corporal Edward Canfield, an American soldier writing weeks before his death in 1918: "The trenches we're in had been taken about 3 or 4 weeks ago, and many dead Germans lay in front of them, unburied. The stench was something awful. I am glad I have a strong stomach."
Havdar Abdul Rahman, an Indian soldier serving with British forces: "For God's sake, don't enlist and come to this war in Europe. Cannons, machine guns, rifles, and bombs are going day and night. In my company, there are only 10 men left. The trench was a horrible sight. The dead were stretched out on one side, one on top of each other, 6 ft high. I thought at the time I should never get the peculiar, disgusting smell of the vapor of warm human blood heated by the sun out of my nostrils."
These are not descriptions of something distant and historical. These are human beings, young men in their 20s, the same age as most of the people watching this video, describing what was being done to them in real time. They wrote these letters to their mothers and wives and brothers and friends back home. They sent them through the postal system of the British Army, which censored anything that might damage morale. And these are the things that got through, the things they described despite the censorship.
8.5 million soldiers died in the First World War. Another 21 million were wounded. Millions more were psychologically broken by what they had seen and experienced in ways that the era had no framework to understand or treat. Shell shock, what we would now recognize as post-traumatic stress disorder, was widely dismissed as cowardice or moral failure. 306 British soldiers were executed by their own side during the war. Many of them for desertion, many of them clearly suffering from what we would now recognize as complete psychological collapse. They were court-martialed and shot at dawn by their fellow soldiers.
The Battle of Verdun, Germany's deliberate strategy to bleed France white. 10 months of sustained fighting in 1916. 300,000 dead. The German Chief of Staff, Erich von Falkenhayn's plan was not to win ground. It was to kill so many French soldiers that France would lose the capacity and the will to continue the war. Attrition as military strategy, the deliberate planned infliction of mass death as an end in itself. The ground at Verdun is so contaminated with the remains of the men who died there, with unexploded ordnance and the chemical residue of poison gas attacks, that it cannot be built on to this day. More than a century later, the land itself bears the mark of what happened there.
Passchendaele. 500,000 casualties for 8 km of terrain in rain turned mud so thick that men and horses drowned in shell craters. The third battle of July to November 1917. One of the most straightforwardly horrifying episodes in recorded human history. Men dying not from enemy fire, but from the terrain itself, the specific obscene landscape that four years of industrial warfare had produced from what had previously been Flemish farmland.
And 863 Commonwealth soldiers died on November 11th, 1918, the last day of the war. The armistice was signed at 5:00 a.m. at Compiègne. It came into effect at 11:00 a.m. In the 6 hours between the signing and the ceasefire, 863 men were killed. Some commanders continued to mount attacks right up to the last moment, whether out of military discipline, personal ambition, or some other calculation that history has never satisfactorily explained. The last British soldier killed in the First World War was Private George Edwin Ellison of the Fifth Royal Irish Lancers. He was killed at approximately 9:30 a.m. on November 11th, 1918, 90 minutes before the armistice came into effect. By coincidence, that is almost too perfect to be true. His grave in the military cemetery near Mons is directly adjacent to the grave of the first British soldier killed in the war. A 16-year-old private named John Parr of the Fourth Battalion Middlesex Regiment, killed in August 1914. The first and the last, side by side, four years between a 16-year-old boy who died before anyone understood what the war would become and a man killed 90 minutes before it was over.
Now, what the war produced, because this is the part of the video that almost no history teacher or documentary has ever connected properly. The Russian Revolution, October 1917. The war created the specific conditions that allowed the Bolsheviks to seize power. Before the war, the Russian Empire was an autocracy with significant internal tensions. Peasant poverty, industrial unrest, a political class that had been demanding reform for decades. But it was functioning. It was not on the verge of Bolshevik revolution in 1914.
What the war did was expose the specific incompetence of the Romanov state in managing an industrial military conflict. The casualty rates were catastrophic. The supply chains broke down. The army ran out of ammunition and food and leadership simultaneously. The Tsar himself took personal command of the military in 1915, tying his personal prestige to the outcome of a war the army was losing. When the army collapsed, he collapsed with it. The Bolsheviks did not create the conditions for the Russian Revolution. The war created the conditions. The Bolsheviks exploited them with a specific efficiency that the other competing political factions lacked.
Without the First World War, there is no Russian Revolution. Without the Russian Revolution, there is no Soviet Union. Without the Soviet Union, there is no Cold War. Without the Cold War, there is no partition of Europe, no Berlin Wall, no nuclear arms race, no proxy wars in Korea and Vietnam and Angola and Afghanistan. No specific shape to the 20th century that produced the world of 2026. All of it. All of it flows from the decision made in the summer of 1914 by three cousins who called each other Willie and Nikki and Georgie and could not stop the machinery they had inherited from crushing them and everyone they were supposed to govern.
Versailles, June 28th, 1919. The Hall of Mirrors at the Palace of Versailles. The specific location chosen by France's Clemenceau as a deliberate humiliation because it was the exact room where the German Empire had been proclaimed after France's defeat in 1871. Germany was not invited to negotiate. The German delegation received the final terms in May 1919 and described them accurately as a dictat, a dictated peace.
Article 231 of the Treaty of Versailles is known as the war guilt clause. It forced Germany to accept complete responsibility for starting the war and causing all the loss and damage suffered by the Allied nations. The article itself never actually used the word "guilt." It was the legal basis for demanding reparations rather than a moral declaration. But to ordinary Germans, the meaning was unmistakable. A country of 65 million people, most of whom had simply been living their lives when the war started, were being told they were personally responsible for everything that had happened.
The reparations were set at 132 billion marks, approximately $442 billion in current value. Germany also lost 13% of its pre-war territory and one-tenth of its population. The army was limited to 100,000 men, no air force, no submarines. The Rhineland was occupied and demilitarized. The economist John Maynard Keynes resigned from the British delegation at Versailles and wrote in 1920, "I believe that the campaign for securing out of Germany the general costs of the war was one of the most serious acts of political unwisdom for which our statesmen have ever been responsible."
Keynes was right. The reparations helped produce the hyperinflation of the 1920s that wiped out the savings of the German middle class virtually overnight. Combined with the Great Depression that hit in 1929, these economic catastrophes created the specific political conditions. Mass unemployment, destroyed savings, national humiliation, a population with nothing to lose in which Adolf Hitler's specific message found a receptive audience. Hitler did not appear from nowhere. He was produced by a specific sequence of decisions made at Versailles. The people who signed the Treaty of Versailles created the conditions that produced Hitler. The people who created the conditions that produced Hitler were the same people who had allowed and managed a war that killed 8.5 million soldiers and then designed the peace settlement that guaranteed another war would follow.
The demographer and historian Niall Ferguson wrote in *The Pity of War* that the First World War was the greatest era of modern history. Not because Germany's defeat was wrong, but because the war itself should not have happened. Ferguson argued that Britain should have stayed out, let Germany and France fight their continental war, accepted a German-dominated Europe rather than destroying both Britain and Germany in a conflict that ultimately served nobody's interests, and that a victorious Germany would have produced something considerably less catastrophic than what actually followed.
This is a controversial argument. Historians dispute it, but consider the counterfactual seriously for a moment. If Germany wins a shorter war in 1915 or 1916, and the German military came very close to winning on multiple occasions, what does Europe look like afterward? No Russian Revolution because the Russian army has not collapsed and the specific conditions for Bolshevik seizure of power have not been created. No Soviet Union, no Versailles humiliation, no hyperinflation, no Great Depression of the specific depth that Germany experienced, no Hitler, no Second World War, no partition of Europe, no Cold War. A German-dominated Europe, which is roughly what the European Union is today with Germany as its economic and political engine, arrived at without the destruction of two world wars and the deaths of somewhere between 70 and 85 million people.
Nobody knows what a German-won World War I would have looked like in practice. Germany in 1914 was not the Germany of 1939. The Kaiser's Germany had an active labor movement, a functioning parliament with genuine power, a sophisticated industrial economy, and was producing some of the most important science and philosophy in human history simultaneously. It was not a liberal democracy by modern standards. But it was not what followed it.
The question of whether what actually happened was better. Whether the Allied victory that produced Versailles, the Russian Revolution, the Soviet Union, Hitler, the Second World War, the Cold War, and the specific broken world of the 20th century was preferable to whatever Germany winning might have produced is a question that serious historians have asked and cannot definitively answer. But the idea that what actually happened was obviously the best possible outcome requires either not thinking about the question or believing that what followed was unavoidable regardless of what happened at Versailles. They were not unavoidable. They were produced.
Now, the demographic consequence, the one that connects World War I directly to the Britain of 2026. The First World War killed approximately 700,000 British soldiers. The Second World War killed approximately 384,000 more. Between them, two world wars killed over a million British men in 30 years. These were not random cross-sections of the male population. They were disproportionately the young, the fit, the ones who passed the military physical. In World War I, specifically, they were disproportionately the ones who volunteered first, the most motivated, the most community-connected, the most willing to act on their sense of duty and purpose. The Pals' battalions made this demographic effect specific and concentrated. Entire male cohorts from specific communities were wiped out in single days. The Leeds men who died on July 1st, 1916, were not replaced by more Leeds men. The Accrington men who died that same morning were not replaced by more men. The communities were permanently marked by the absence of the specific people who had been lost.
By 1945, Britain had lost two generations of young men in 30 years. The economy was in ruins. The infrastructure needed rebuilding. The NHS was being created and needed staffing. The transport networks needed workers. The manufacturing sector needed workers. The construction industry needed workers. And there were not enough British workers to fill the need because two world wars had killed the men who would have filled it. And the women who had entered the workforce during the wars were not filling the industrial and manual roles the reconstruction required.
The British Nationality Act of 1948 gave citizenship of the United Kingdom and Colonies to everyone who was at that time a British subject by virtue of having been born in a British colony. The act and active British government encouragement led to a wave of immigration from the Caribbean. On June 22nd, 1948, the HMT Empire Windrush docked at Tilbury with 1,027 passengers to meet what the historical record describes as Britain's desperate labor shortage after the war. Between 1948 and 1970, nearly half a million people moved from the Caribbean to Britain to fill the labor shortages in the NHS, in transport, in manufacturing, in construction. The labor shortages produced by the loss of two generations of British men in two world wars. The chain is specific and documented. World War I killed the men. World War II killed more. The postwar economy needed labor. The labor had to come from somewhere. The Windrush came.
You can discuss whether the immigration that followed was beneficial or harmful in various ways. But the specific reason it happened, the specific gap in the British male population that it was filling was produced by the decisions made in the summer of 1914 by three cousins who called each other Willie and Nikki and Georgie. The Britain of 2026 is in a direct and traceable causal chain, the consequence of what happened on the Western Front between 1914 and 1918.
Now, the deepest question, the one that is almost never asked because asking it requires a kind of intellectual courage that most commentary on the First World War declines to exercise. It's what was lost. Not just the 8.5 million soldiers, not just the communities emptied by the Pals' battalions, not just the specific men who would have become the fathers and builders and leaders of the next generation. What was lost at the level of civilization?
The Victorian and Edwardian era produced something extraordinary. The architecture, the art, the science, the philosophy, the literature, the music, the engineering. These were not the products of a society coasting on inherited advantage. They were the products of a civilization at the peak of its creative capacity. Men and women who were building on a foundation laid over centuries and who were producing things that have not been equaled since.
Walk through central London. The buildings that stop you, the ones that make you ask how people built that, how they achieved that level of craft and ambition in stone and brick and glass, almost all of them are Victorian or Edwardian: the Natural History Museum, the Victoria and Albert Museum, St. Pancras Station, the Royal Albert Hall, the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, the Old Bailey, Tower Bridge. These are not the products of the culture that came after World War I. They are the products of the culture that World War I ended.
After the war, something changed. Not just in Britain, but across Europe. The confidence was gone. The ambition was gone. The specific quality of a civilization that builds things to last for centuries because it believes it has centuries ahead of it gone. The architecture that came after World War I is smaller, plainer, more provisional. Not because the technical capacity was not there. Because the psychological capacity, the civilizational self-belief had been damaged in ways that took decades to process, and that arguably have never fully healed.
The German philosopher Oswald Spengler published *The Decline of the West* in 1918, the year the war ended. He argued that Western civilization was following the same trajectory as all previous civilizations: growth, peak, decline, fall, and that the First World War was the signal that the decline phase had begun. Spengler was a pessimist, and his specific predictions were sometimes wrong. But the basic observation that a civilization which destroys its own finest generation in a pointless war has done something to itself that cannot simply be repaired has a weight that the subsequent century has not diminished.
The specific tragedy of World War I is this: European civilization in 1914 was the most remarkable human achievement in recorded history. The science, the art, the architecture, the philosophy, the medicine, the technology, the standard of living, the accumulated knowledge. Nothing in human history had produced anything comparable. And the people who had built it, who had inherited it, and were continuing to develop it, looked at each other across a few hundred miles of European farmland, and decided to feed their sons into it for 4 years. Not for territory they needed, not for resources they lacked. For reasons that were so obscure even at the time that historians are still arguing about them, for alliances and mobilization schedules and the specific inability of political and military institutions to say stop when the machinery was already moving. For the pride and insecurity and mutual incomprehension of men who had never expected to be managing a conflict of this scale and who had no framework for stopping it once it had started.
George V refusing to give his cousin Nicholas asylum in Britain after the Russian Revolution is the image that stays with me. Here is the man whose decisions helped start the war. Whose family had been intertwined with the Romanovs for generations. Whose first cousin Nicholas, a man he had grown up with who looked so like him that people confused them, is now a prisoner of the Bolsheviks with his wife and five children. And George V, advised by his government, refused them asylum because he feared the presence of the deposed Tsar might inspire a revolution in Britain. Nicholas and Alexandra and their five children, Olga, Tatiana, Maria, Anastasia, Alexei, were shot in a basement in Yekaterinburg in July 1918. Alexei was 13. George V was haunted by the decision for the rest of his life. He died in 1936. He never stopped thinking about it.
The cousins who had called each other Willie and Nikki and Georgie ended the war as follows. Nikki was shot in a basement with his children. Willie fled to the Netherlands where he died in 1941. Georgie died on his throne in 1936 after hastening his own death. His doctors administered a lethal dose of morphine and cocaine to spare him a lingering end, leaving behind a country that had won the war and lost a generation simultaneously.
The war that was supposed to be over by Christmas 1914 ended in November 1918. It killed 8.5 million soldiers and wounded 21 million more. It produced the Russian Revolution and the Soviet Union. It produced Versailles and the humiliation that produced Hitler. It produced the Second World War that killed 70 to 85 million more people. It produced the Cold War. It produced the demographic collapse that produced the Windrush. It produced the specific broken, traumatized, diminished Europe that spent the rest of the 20th century dealing with the consequences of what it had done to itself in four years. And it ended the specific Europe that had built the buildings you walk past today and cannot believe were made by human hands.
The men of the Pals' battalions who went over the top on July 1st, 1916, the Leeds men and the Accrington men and the Sheffield men and the Liverpool men were not fighting for anything that a serious analysis of the war's origins and consequences can justify. They were the finest young men of their communities, the most motivated and community-connected and purposeful, and they walked into German machine gun fire carrying 66 lb of equipment at a steady pace because they had been told to. Percy Holmes said, "The bell at Christ Church told all the day." In towns across Britain, the bells told all the day. And the Europe that those bells mourned never came back.
That is what WW1 produced. That is what the cousins who called each other, Willie and Nikki and Georgie, started in the summer of 1914 when the machinery moved faster than their letters. That is why it was our greatest sin. Not because any single person intended it, not because any single decision was obviously wrong in isolation. Because a civilization at the peak of its achievement looked at itself and could not find a way to stop. Because the institutions that were supposed to manage conflict failed to manage this one. Because the financial interests that profited from the war had more structural power than the political interests that might have stopped it. Because three cousins writing desperate telegrams in English could not slow down the trains that were already moving. The bell at Christ Church told all the day. And the world that exists now, this specific world with its specific problems and its specific demographics and its specific political configurations is the world that bell produced. We are still living in it.
Let me go deeper into something that almost never gets discussed in the context of the First World War. The historical pattern of civilizations destroying themselves. Because World War I was not the first time this happened. It was not even unusual in the long sweep of history. What was unusual was the scale, the industrial machinery of mass death applied to the specific self-destruction of the most powerful civilization the world had ever produced. But the pattern, the pattern is ancient.
The Peloponnesian War (431–404 BC). Athens and Sparta, the two greatest city-states of the ancient Greek world. Between them, the creators of the civilizational foundation that Western Europe had been building on for 2,000 years, spent 27 years trying to destroy each other. Athens produced democracy, philosophy, the Parthenon, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Thucydides, the specific intellectual achievements that define the Western tradition. Sparta produced the most effective military culture in the ancient world, the specific combination of discipline, courage, and collective commitment that made its soldiers the most feared in Greece. And they spent 27 years in a war that weakened both of them so profoundly that neither ever fully recovered. Athens lost its empire. Sparta won, but at a cost that left it unable to maintain the victory. And into the vacuum left by their mutual destruction walked Macedon, Philip, and then Alexander, who conquered both of them.
Thucydides, an Athenian general who fought in the war and then wrote its history because he had been exiled and had time, understood what he was watching. He wrote that the war was not caused by the growth of Athenian power alone, nor by the fear that this caused in Sparta. It was caused by the accumulation of specific decisions made by specific people who could not see clearly because they were inside the situation: miscalculation, prestige, the inability to back down from commitments that had been made before the full consequences were understood. Substitute Athens and Sparta for Britain and Germany, and Thucydides wrote a history of 1914 in 404 BC.
The Peloponnesian War did not end Greek civilization, but it damaged it irreparably. The Greece that came after was not the Greece of Pericles. It was a Greece that had consumed its own substance in a war between its two greatest cities and had never recovered the civilizational confidence that had produced the Parthenon and the symposium and the tragedies of Sophocles.
The First World War did not end Western civilization, but it damaged it irreparably. The Europe that came after was not the Europe of Victoria and Lutians and Darwin and Mahler. It was a Europe that had consumed its own substance in a war between its greatest nations and has never recovered the civilizational confidence that produced those things.
The Roman parallel is equally precise. The Social War of 91–87 BC: Rome fighting its own Italian allies. The people who had fought alongside Roman legions for generations, who had contributed the manpower that built the Roman Empire, who were in every meaningful sense Romans in everything except legal status. The Social War killed approximately 300,000 people on both sides. Romans killing the people who had fought alongside them to build the most powerful state on earth. Rome won the Social War. It also extended Roman citizenship to the Italian allies immediately afterward, which meant the war had been fought at an enormous cost in Roman and Italian lives for a result that could have been achieved by a political decision made before the first battle. The specific waste of it, the specific pointlessness of the killing when the political solution was available and was implemented anyway is the thing that resonates. Or the Roman civil wars. Caesar against Pompey, Octavian against Antony, the specific destruction of the Roman Republic through a series of civil wars in which the greatest generals and statesmen Rome had ever produced spent their careers killing each other. And what came out the other side was the empire, a more stable political structure in some ways, but one in which the civic virtue that had built the republic was permanently diminished. Augustus tried to restore it through legislation and largely failed. The Romans who came after the civil wars were not the Romans who had fought them.
The First World War fits this pattern precisely. The greatest civilization the world had produced at the peak of its powers, turning its military and industrial capacity against itself. What came out the other side was more stable in some ways—the League of Nations, the attempt at international frameworks for managing conflict—but permanently diminished in the specific quality that had made the civilization extraordinary. The civilizational confidence, the belief that what was being built was worth building. The specific quality of a culture that constructs the Natural History Museum or the Vienna Opera House or the Cologne Cathedral because it believes that beauty and permanence matter. That quality did not survive the Western Front intact.
Now, the Christmas Truce of 1914. December 24th, the Western Front. In violation of orders, without any official sanction from any military authority on either side. German and British soldiers climbed out of their trenches on Christmas Eve 1914 and met in no man's land. They exchanged cigarettes and food and photographs of their families. They sang Christmas carols. In some sectors, they played football. Though the specific details of these games are disputed by historians, the general phenomenon of fraternization is documented in dozens of accounts from both sides. Lieutenant Colonel's diary describes the moving interactions he had with German soldiers and the Christmas decorations that soldiers put up throughout the trench.
The men in the trenches, the actual men who were doing the dying, understood in December 1914, without being told, that the men on the other side of no man's land were the same as them. Same age, same fears, same letters home, same reasons to want to be somewhere else. The specific humanity of the enemy, which the military and political machinery required to be suppressed, reasserted itself in the silence of Christmas Eve in the Belgian mud. Their officers ordered them back into the trenches. The war continued.
This is the specific moral obscenity of the First World War in miniature. The men who were doing the dying understood that it was senseless. They demonstrated the understanding by climbing out of their trenches and meeting the people they were supposed to be killing and treating them as human beings for 24 hours. And then they were ordered back into the trenches to continue killing them. The Christmas Truce of 1914 did not repeat in 1915. The machinery had had another year to dehumanize the enemy and harden the men to what they were doing. By 1916, the question of Christmas truces was not being seriously raised. The war had done what wars do to the people inside them. It had made the killing ordinary.
Now, the poets, because the specific literary response to the First World War tells you something that the statistics and the military histories cannot. Wilfred Owen was a British officer who was killed on November 4th, 1918, one week before the armistice. He had spent the war writing poetry in which he documented with clinical precision what was being done to the men around him. His poem *Dulce et Decorum Est*—the title comes from the Latin phrase meaning "it is sweet and fitting to die for one's country"—describes a gas attack with a specificity of horror that no official document of the period matches. He uses the phrase "the old lie" for the Latin tag because he believed, having seen what he had seen, that the idea that it was sweet and fitting to die for your country was not a noble sentiment, but a lie that was sending young men to their deaths. He was killed a week before the war ended. He did not live to see whether his poetry changed anything. It did not change the war, but it changed the understanding of the war that subsequent generations would carry. Owen's poetry is now read by millions. *Dulce et decorum est* is probably the most widely read English language poem of the 20th century. The institutions that killed him could not prevent his account of what those institutions had done from becoming permanent.
Siegfried Sassoon was a British officer who refused to return to the front in 1917 and published a public statement declaring that the war was being deliberately prolonged by the people who had the power to end it. He was not court-martialed. His senior officers, afraid of the public statement becoming a cause, had him declared to be suffering from shell shock and sent to a psychiatric hospital instead. He survived the war. He spent the rest of his life writing about it.
The poets understood something the generals and the politicians did not. Not because they were more intelligent or better informed, but because they were in the trenches rather than behind desks. And proximity to the reality of what the war was doing produced a different kind of understanding than distance from it.
Now, the colonial soldiers, because this is the part of the story that the British history curriculum almost entirely...
omits. The First World War was not fought only by British and French and German and Russian men. It was fought by men from India, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, the Caribbean, East Africa, West Africa, North Africa. The full geography of the European empires.
Over 1.5 million men from the Indian subcontinent served in the British army during the First World War. More than 74,000 were killed. They fought in France, in Gallipoli, in Mesopotamia, in East Africa. They left their villages and their families and their lives to fight for an empire that did not grant them equal citizenship, in a war whose causes had nothing to do with them, in countries whose languages they did not speak, for political and military objectives they had not been consulted about.
Havdar Abdul Rahman's letter, "For God's sake don't enlist and come to this war in Europe," was written by an Indian soldier who had already enlisted and was writing from inside the experience. He understood what he had found himself in. He was trying to prevent others from following him into it.
The Canadians at Vimy Ridge in April 1917. One of the rare unambiguous Allied tactical successes of the war. The capture of a heavily fortified German position on a ridge overlooking the Douai plain. The four Canadian divisions attacked simultaneously for the first time and took the ridge in 4 days that German defenders had held for years. 3,598 Canadians were killed. 7,044 were wounded. The battle is remembered in Canada as a defining national moment. The specific point at which Canada, which had sent its men to fight in a European war as part of the British Empire, found a national identity distinct from that empire. Canada paid for it in blood and found in the paying of it a sense of who it was.
The Australians and New Zealanders at Gallipoli. The campaign that began in April 1915 and ended in January 1916. The British, French, Australian, and New Zealand forces attempting to seize the Gallipoli Peninsula from the Ottoman Empire in order to open a sea route to Russia. The plan was based on inadequate intelligence and executed with organizational failures that the subsequent investigation documented in devastating detail. The ANZAC forces, Australian and New Zealand, were landed at the wrong beach, pinned down by Turkish forces on the high ground, and spent 8 months in conditions of extraordinary hardship and violence for a campaign that achieved none of its objectives. 26,000 Australians and New Zealanders were killed or wounded at Gallipoli.
The campaign is now remembered in both countries as a foundational national event. The date of the Gallipoli landings, April 25th, is Anzac Day, the most significant national day in both Australia and New Zealand. The specific note of it is not triumphalism. It is the memory of having been sacrificed for other people's strategic miscalculations, of having shown extraordinary courage and endurance in a campaign that was doomed before it started by the incompetence of the planning that sent them there.
The men from the Caribbean who served in the British West Indies Regiment, some 15,000 of them, were kept in a separate battalion from white soldiers, given menial labor tasks rather than combat roles initially, and paid less than white soldiers of equivalent rank. After the war, they returned to colonies where nothing had changed as a result of their service. The specific experience of being asked to die for an empire that did not treat them as equals and then returning to that empire unchanged was one of the political radicalizing experiences that produced the Caribbean independence movements of the mid-20th century.
The war was sold to all of these men—British, Indian, Canadian, Australian, New Zealander, Caribbean—as a war for civilization, for freedom, for the rights of small nations. The specific gap between the language in which it was sold and the reality of what it was produced a generation of men across the empire who had seen the gap with their own eyes and could not unsee it.
Now, the generals. Because the criticism of World War I military leadership is so well established that it has almost become a cliché. "Lions led by donkeys." And the cliché, like most clichés, obscures more than it reveals. Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig commanded the British Expeditionary Force from December 1915 until the end of the war. He is the man most associated in British public memory with the strategy of attrition: the deliberate, sustained infliction of casualties on the German army in the belief that Germany would run out of men and will before Britain did. The Somme, Passchendaele—the battles that produced the casualty figures that still define how the war is remembered.
The critique of Haig is that he repeated failures that should have been obvious after the first time. That he continued to send men into attacks that experience had demonstrated would produce enormous casualties for minimal gains. That he prioritized his own reputation and his relationship with his political masters over the welfare of the men he commanded.
The defense of Haig, which serious military historians have mounted, is that he faced a genuinely novel military situation for which no previous doctrine existed. The combination of industrial firepower, static defensive positions, barbed wire, and machine guns had created a tactical stalemate that nobody had theorized solutions to because nothing like it had existed before. The generals of World War I were not stupid men. They were men applying the military doctrines they had been trained in to a situation in which those doctrines had not anticipated, in real time, without the ability to stop the war while they worked out better approaches. This is not an exoneration of Haig. It is a more precise diagnosis of what went wrong. The problem was not that the generals were uniquely incompetent. The problem was that industrial warfare had outrun the military theory that was supposed to manage it. The technology of killing had advanced faster than the theory of how to use it wisely. The machine gun and barbed wire and heavy artillery had created a defensive dominance that the offensive doctrines of 1914 had no answer to. And four years were spent finding the answer while the men died in the space between the trenches. The specific answer, the combination of tanks, aircraft, artillery coordination, and infantry tactics that was finally being deployed effectively in 1918 came too late for the men of the Pals' battalions who had gone over the top on July 1st, 1916.
Now, the Spanish flu. Because the First World War produced one more catastrophe that is almost never connected to it in popular history. In 1918, as the war was ending, a global pandemic of influenza spread across the world. The Spanish flu, so-called because Spain was one of the few neutral countries whose press had not been censored by wartime restrictions and could therefore report on the epidemic honestly, killed somewhere between 50 million and 100 million people worldwide—more than the First World War itself killed, possibly more than any epidemic in recorded human history.
The specific conditions that produced the Spanish flu's extraordinary lethality were created by the First World War. Millions of men crowded into close quarters in terrible sanitary conditions, malnourished, immunologically compromised by years of stress and exposure, moving constantly between the Western Front and their home countries. As the war ended and the demobilization began, the war created the ideal conditions for a pathogen to spread globally faster than had ever been possible before. And the specific strain of influenza that emerged in 1918 was uniquely lethal to young adults—the exact demographic that the war had gathered in such extraordinary numbers in such concentrated misery. The Spanish flu did not cause the war. The war created the conditions that made the Spanish flu's global spread and lethality possible.
It is the final item in the account of what World War I produced. The last catastrophe in the specific sequence of catastrophes that began in the summer of 1914 when three cousins could not stop the machinery of European war from moving. 20 million killed in the war. 50 to 100 million killed in the flu pandemic that the war's conditions made possible. 60 to 80 million killed in the Second World War that the war's peace settlement made inevitable. Tens of millions killed in the Soviet Union that the war's political conditions produced. The Cold War, the proxy conflicts, the partition of Europe, the nuclear arms race—the chain of consequences from the summer of 1914 runs unbroken through the rest of the 20th century and into the 21st.
Now, let me return to something more personal. The specific quality of what was lost that the numbers cannot capture. Walk through any English village that had young men in 1914. Find the war memorial. They are in almost every village in Britain. Usually in the church or the churchyard or the village square. The names on them are not abstract. They are the specific names of specific men from that specific place. Read them in villages with populations of a few hundred. The lists of dead sometimes run to 20 or 30 names. In some cases, entire male cohorts of the village—fathers and sons together, brothers, cousins, men who had grown up playing together, who had worked together, who had expected to grow old together.
There are 52 thankful villages in England, settlements from which every man who went to war came home. 52 villages out of the thousands that sent men to the front. The other thousands have war memorials. The 52 thankful villages are remarkable precisely because they are so rare.
The architecture of remembrance that the war produced—the war memorials in every village, the Cenotaph in Whitehall, the grave markers of the Commonwealth War Graves Commission that maintain 23,000 burial sites in more than 150 countries—is itself a monument to the specific scale of what was lost. The Commonwealth War Graves Commission was founded in 1917, during the war, because it was already clear that the dead were going to number in the hundreds of thousands and that some systematic approach to honoring them was required. The fact that an institution had to be created during the war to manage the sheer volume of the dead—that is the measure of what the summer of 1914 set in motion.
The men in those graves were real. They had names and faces and families and plans for their lives. They had skills and talents and specific ways of seeing the world that were extinguished in the mud of France and Belgium and Gallipoli and Mesopotamia and East Africa and all the other places the war spread to. The specific potential that was lost—the discoveries not made, the buildings not built, the children not born, the communities not led by the men who were supposed to lead them—is incalculable. Not in a vague rhetorical sense, in a precise and specific sense. The specific human capital of European civilization was depleted in ways that cannot be quantified but also cannot be denied. The specific irony that Lutyens, the greatest architect of the Edwardian era, the man whose talent would in normal times have been used to continue building the civilization, spent his post-war career designing the memorials to the civilization he would have built. That is not a metaphor. That is the literal biography of the most gifted builder of his generation.
Now, the close. The question that this video has been building toward since the first line. Was it our greatest sin? The word sin implies intent. Implies knowledge of wrongdoing. The people who started the First World War did not intend the Russian Revolution. Did not intend Hitler. Did not intend the Second World War. Did not intend the Spanish flu pandemic. Did not intend the demographic collapse that produced the Windrush. Did not intend the Cold War or the nuclear arms race or the specific broken world that the 20th century produced. They intended a short war. Everyone expected a short war. The German chief of staff's plan, the Schlieffen Plan, was designed for a war of approximately 6 weeks. The British Expeditionary Force was equipped and organized for a short campaign. The French Plan 17 assumed a rapid offensive that would end the war quickly. Nobody planned for 4 years.
The sin, if it is a sin, is not of intent. It is of civilizational failure. The failure of the institutions that were supposed to manage conflict to manage this one. The failure of the financial system that was simultaneously profiting from arming both sides. The failure of the diplomatic architecture that had constructed a web of alliances so rigid that a single assassination in Sarajevo could trigger a continental war in 6 weeks. The failure of the three cousins who called each other Willie and Nicky and Georgie to translate their personal relationships into the political authority required to stop the machinery before it started.
These failures were not inevitable. The war was not inevitable. At multiple points in the summer of 1914, different decisions by different people would have produced different outcomes. The specific decisions that produced the war were made by specific people who could, in theory, have made different ones. That is what makes it a sin rather than a natural disaster. Natural disasters happen. You cannot assign responsibility for an earthquake. You can assign responsibility for a war that was started by decisions made by identifiable people in identifiable rooms for identifiable reasons, even if those reasons were confused and partial and ultimately insufficient to justify what followed.
The three cousins, the generals, the financiers who profited from arming both sides, the politicians who constructed the alliance systems that made a local conflict into a global catastrophe, the diplomats who could not find a way to stop the mobilization once it had started—these were human beings making human decisions. The consequences of those decisions were 8.5 million dead soldiers, 21 million wounded, 50 to 100 million dead in the pandemic the war produced, 60 to 80 million dead in the war the peace settlement produced, and the end of the specific Europe that had built the world's greatest civilization.