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Updated: June 11, 2025
These complex institutions, occupied by men, women and children were smashed and burned wholesale. The figures which I have used in listing the 1914-18 war losses were compiled by the United States War Department.
As the 1914-18 war proceeded it became less a series of combats between human beings; more and more it was a war of machines such as battleships, tanks, big guns and by war's end, of airplanes. Human beings drew up the plans, made the blueprints, shifted the gears, pushed the buttons.
Not all victims of the hideous 1914-18 blood bath were killed. "Wound casualties" numbered 12.8 million among the Allies; 8.4 million among the boys, young men and adults mobilized by the Central Powers. Some of the wounded were crippled for life.
Certainly people expected much more from it than it could possibly give. But it was the delegates themselves who had aroused these expectations announcing the coming of a new epoch at their fiat. The peoples were publicly told by Mr. Lloyd George and several of his colleagues that the war of 1914-18 would be the last.
The logical ideology of such a formula was egomania, suspicion, fear and hatred. Its outcome was a competitive life and death struggle for wealth and power, with the nation or a bloc of nations as the units of competition. The struggle at its highest level involved occasional local wars and periodical general wars like those of 1914-18 and 1936-45.
That sort of thing belongs rather to the Palmerston days than to these; belongs to days that were nearer in spirit to the Waterloo of 1815, which a haughty England won, than to the Waterloo of 1914-18, which a humbler England so nearly lost. Turn we next the other way for a look at ourselves.
During the half century that began in 1910, tens of millions were mobilized, fed, taught, armed, and led to the slaughter fields by the masters of western civilization in two long orgies of wholesale destruction and mass murder 1914-18 and 1936-1945.
Peace advocates mobilized wide public support for the "no more war" movement that developed during the closing months of the 1914-18 war; for the Briand-Kellogg Treaty of 1928 which renounced war as an instrument of policy; for the effort to secure general disarmament that resulted in the General Disarmament Conference of 1933 and for the United Nations Charter of 1945.
The slogan of this movement was "United we stand, divided we fall. The bell which tolls for one, tolls for all. When one benefits all benefit. Peace, progress and prosperity promote general welfare." Two general wars in 1914-18 and 1939-45, brought pre-meditated, deliberated suffering, hardships and death to multitudes.
At the same time her natural resources were being depleted and with the growing importance of cotton, rubber and petroleum, all of which Britain must import, her economic ascendancy was progressively undermined. During the wars of 1914-18 and 1936-45 Britain entered an era of decreasing relative importance.
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