They have their antecedents also in the anonymous remains still upturned today by farmers ploughing the bloodsoaked soil of the Somme-“I stop work at once. They have their antecedents in the scraps of barbed wire that litter the fields where the trenches ran, filling theįrench air with the smell of rust on a damp morning, in the mildewed military leather a visitor finds under a hedgerow, in the verdigrised brass of a badge or button, corroded clips of ammunition and pockmarked shards of The spot where the gas chambers worked, these are as much relics of the First as of the Second World War. A child’s shoe in the Polish dust, a scrap of rusting barbed wire, a residue of pulverised bone near Hutments of Auschwitz and the remnants of the obliterated extermination camps at Sobibor, Belzec and Treblinka.

The derelict fortifications of the Atlantic Wall, built in the vain hope of holding his enemies at bay, are monuments to his desire for vengeance so, too, are the decaying Rotterdam, London-that he himself laid waste. The monuments to the vengeance he took stand throughout the continent he devastated, in the reconstructed centres of his own German cities, flattened by the strategic bombing campaign that he provoked, and of those-Leningrad, Stalingrad, Warsaw, No, we do not pardon, we demand-vengeance!” On 18 September 1922, Adolf Hitler, the demobilised frontįighter, threw down a challenge to defeated Germany that he would realise seventeen years later: “It cannot be that two million Germans should have fallen in vain. The Second World War, five times more destructive of human life and incalculably more costly in material terms, was the direct outcome of the First. Goodwill found a voice tragic because the consequences of the first clash ended the lives of ten million human beings, tortured the emotional lives of millions more, destroyed the benevolent and optimistic culture of theĮuropean continent and left, when the guns at last fell silent four years later, a legacy of political rancour and racial hatred so intense that no explanation of the causes of the Second World War can stand without reference Unnecessary because the train of events that led to its outbreak might have been broken at any point during the five weeks of crisis that preceded the first clash of arms, had prudence or common The First World War was a tragic and unnecessary conflict.

The First World War by John Keegan