One young British soldier killed in action one week before the war ended was the poet Wilfrid Owen, aged 25, killed at the Battle of the Sambre on November 4, 1918. The news of his death reached his family just as the town's church bells rang out the peace.

My great-grandmother and aunt aged 3 named Esperanza ("Hope") were killed in the Austrian shelling of Farrara, Italy in 1916. How many millions of lives were never lived because of this war ? Growing up in the 1950s, my mom taught us to observe a Minute of Silence at 11 AM on every November 11, to pray for the millions who died. This war was a catastrophe beyond "Biblical proportions."

"The Parable of The Old Man and the Young" by Wilfrid Owen.

So Abram rose, and clave the wood, and went,
And took the fire with him, and a knife.
And as they sojourned both of them together,
Isaac the first-born spake and said, My Father,
Behold the preparations, fire and iron,
But where the lamb for this burnt-offering?
Then Abram bound the youth with belts and straps,
and builded parapets and trenches there,
And stretchèd forth the knife to slay his son.
When lo! an angel called him out of heaven,
Saying, Lay not thy hand upon the lad,
Neither do anything to him. Behold,
A ram, caught in a thicket by its horns;
Offer the Ram of Pride instead of him.

But the old man would not so, but slew his son,
And half the seed of Europe, one by one.


(Wilfred Owen's poetry on the realities of trench and gas warfare stands in
stark contrast to both the public perception of war at the time, and to the confidently patriotic verse written by Rupert Brooke and others.)

After the Serbian assassination of the Austrian Archduke in Sarajevo 1914,
Emperor Franz Joseph I of Austria-Hungary, Czar Nicholas II of Russia (ally of Serbia), King George V of England (ally of France), and even Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany (ally of Austria), being friends and cousins, were not themselves keen for war, and corresponded to cool down the furor of the Serbian incident. But these rival colonial-industrial powers were hottly competive for foreign colonies and their resources. The upward chain of alliances sucked them all into the maelstrom: the Kaiser's ministers pushed heavily to employ the munitions manufacturers with whom they colluded, and their military command had waitied since 1905 to execute their strategic Schlieffen Plan to again attack France.

In France, "The Front" quickly became a merciless killing-field to which millions of young troops were marched from all sides to be slaughtered with never the advance of a foot of territory ! The Treaty of Versailles demanded immense "Reparations" payments from Germany which led directly to the collapse of the German Mark in 1923, and so to the despair and bitterness that set the stage for Hitler, and so to the next catastrophe.