The war to end all wars was an idea to hold onto for a while, but it would prove an illusion. How many young men, civilians as well were killed? I suppose a couple of taps on the phone would tell us. There, 40 million it says. I suppose that would be give or take a million or two but who can ever know.
There had never been anything like it before, but then mechanized death wasn't possible before. The nearest I suppose Europe had come to it was the French Revolutionary & Napoleonic wars. One great writer, it might have been Madame de Stael said he - Napoleon - had sown the bones of 20 million soles across Europe, but I think that might have been exaggerated.
I was going to look up the toll of ww2 but what do the numbers matter, they are so immense.
And we can go further back in time and wonder about the deaths the Roman armies incurred, or the Mongol invasions of China and Central Asia, or the deaths incurred by the great migrations that finally brought Rome down and created a long period of instability and violence.
We can look at the last 20-30 years and find untold deaths and violence.
But it's when we look ahead that the real worries begin because people we know and our children will suffer. And I don't want to be morose and go there. We all know the troubles, too many to list, that beset every corner of the world and how many possible flashpoints there are to ignite an Armageddon.
Have we got better than our ancestors at so arranging affairs and disputes between all the contending parties everywhere that we can say, as people did in 1919 or 1946, that's it, no more of this?
It's just all such a bloody mess and human beings don't seem to have the capacity to settle little problems never mind the bigger ones.
So what we do is keep trying, what else is there?
I hope I havent depressed anybody with all this, it just seemed to be something I wanted to say.
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