Delanceyplace.com 07/20/06-Less Than 100 Years Ago

In today's excerpt, world leaders in 1914 do not understand how powerful their armies have become, and how much destruction they will cause. In the centuries before the 1800s, world population had grown at a snail's pace. But between 1870 and the beginning of the first World War, the population of Europe had increased by 100,000,000, as much as its whole population in 1650, as a result of a technological revolution that improves life spans--but also produces unprecedented weaponry. And thus World War I unleashes destruction that would kill 8.5 million and wound in excess of 20 million more, several times the casualties of all the Napoleonic wars combined. A naive and young Winston Churchill, then First Lord of the Admiralty, cannot contain his excitement:

"Russia's general mobilization...called up the Russian reserves--a staggering total of four million men, enough to frighten any nation on earth...

"This was war on a truly new scale; the army with which Wellington defeated Napoleon at Waterloo had totaled sixty thousand men...

"The Germans hauled into Belgium...two new kinds of monster artillery: 305 Skoda siege mortars...plus an almost unimaginably huge 420 howitzer produced by Germany's Krupp steelworks (that) weighed seventy- five tons and had to be transported by rail in five sections and set in concrete before going into action.

"Among the holders of high office, one man at least did not share the sense of glum foreboding: the ebullient young Winston Churchill... he wrote to Prime Minister Asquith's wife, 'I love this war. I know it's smashing and shattering the lives of thousands every moment and yet--I can't help it--I enjoy every second of it.' "

G.J. Meyer, A World Undone, Delacorte Press, 2006, pp. 64, 66, 110, 115, 118