The 1st World War in Europe. Known as the war to end all wars, lasted for four years and planted the seeds of the 2nd World War.

At right, von Hindenburg

The German danger, coupled with Russian-Austrian rivalry in the Balkans, created a diplomatic configuration that presented difficulties far too great for the mediocre men who headed European foreign offices on the eve of 1914. When the Serbian terrorist Gavrilo Princip assassinated Austrian Archduke Francis Ferdinand on June 28, 1914, he ignited the diplomatic powder keg. The enthusiasm with which the European peoples greeted the outbreak of hostilities quickly turned to horror as casualty lists lengthened and limited aims became irrelevant. What had been projected as a brief war between states became a four-year struggle between peoples.

When the guns finally did fall silent in the last weeks of 1918, the German, Austrian, and Russian empires had collapsed, and the greater part of a generation of young men lay dead. A portent of things to come was that the principal figure at the Paris Peace Conference (1919) was United States President Woodrow Wilson. Determined to make the world "safe for democracy," Wilson had led the United States into war with Germany in 1917. As he was issuing a clarion call for a democratic Europe, Vladimir Ilich Lenin, the Bolshevik leader who in the same year had seized power in Russia, was summoning the European proletariat to class war and offering to supply the ideological keys to a Communist state.

Turning a deaf ear to both prophets of a world transformed, France and England insisted upon a punitive peace, and Germany, Austria, Hungary, Bulgaria, and Turkey were obliged to sign treaties that had nothing to do with messianic dreams.