The more I learn about it, the more I've come to appreciate World War I, and now feel it's actually more influential on our modern world than its successor. Which is a shame because as I said before on xanga, it's completely shadowed by the intense personalities of the second World War. Seriously, if you compare Wilhelm II, von Moltke, Ludendorff, Lloyd George, Haig, Joffre, Nicholas II, Pershing, Poincaré, and Wilson with Stalin, Roosevelt, Hitler, Churchill, Mussolini, Patton, Eisenhower, MacArthur, Rommel, or Gudarian, there's no way WWI can win. The only real person who sticks out is Rasputin, and he wasn't even a real part of the war, just a component of Russia's decline.

But I like it because I feel it's the final nail on the coffin of Old Europe, the period I study. Generals who fought in this war had titles like "prince," the French still wore breastplates, and initially when people surrendered generals offered up their sword, which was symbolically returned to them. The Great War forcefully dragged everyone into the twentieth century. First off, it completely changed battle tactics. It's not that nations didn't own cannons, machine guns, battleships, and airplanes before the war; it's just that they were never used on anther nation that also had it. Up until this point, people were fighting natives like the Zulu who didn't have much besides spears and bows and arrows. The only glimpses the world had at what was to come was our Civil War and the Russo-Japanese War, but the weapons back then were not nearly as deadly as in 1914. When we hear about the thousands of people dying uselessly in WWI, it's because the generals literally didn't know what to do and were using Old World tactics. Things like the cavalry charge followed up with the infantry, which is the standard for thousands of years, now just gets your troops mowed down by machine guns. It took about three years for military leaders to finally adjust to the new reality, but unfortunately whilst they were experimenting whole armies of men died in the process.

Then there was the complete breakdown of nations. Before the war, people held titles like "emperor," "caesar," or "king." Royalty in Europe literally held absolute power in some places, just like the kings of old. That was gone by the end of the war as crowns fell into the gutter, and the systems we know today began to rise: Austria-Hungary, Germany, and Russia all lost their imperial families and the first two became democratic, the last turned to totalitarian communism.

And it's not just those three countries. The leaders of the winners, Wilson of the US, Lloyd George of the UK, and Clemenceau of France just basically sat in a room together for six months and literally hammered out the fate of the world, consequences that we still face today. Pretty much all of our problems in Europe and the Middle East (and even parts of Asia) can be traced back to these six months. Half the time these three didn't know the geography or the cultural impact as they drew lines and the other half they didn't give a shit. Oh wait, Iraq is placed literally on the dividing line between Sunni and Shiite? Fuck that, we need a country there for oil. Where the hell is Czechoslovakia again? Do the Czechs even like the Slovaks? Eh, just smash 'em together. Whole countries were remade into the way we think of them today.

WWI is fascinating for a historian because it's a transition period, but unlike other similar moments of history this is fast, definite, and easily traceable. For example, when you ask when does the Renaissance begins and ends, you get something from the 1300s to the 1500s, sometimes as early as the 1200s, and no two people provide the same dates. Here people can point and say, "1914 to 1918. Here's how, here's why, and this is exactly what happened." Although WWII was game changer, don't get me wrong, we had already stepped into the modern era by this point. It was just a continuation of the game.