Why was World War I called The Great War?

like: let's get it on already.

they did czechoslovakia in march '39 i think.

it's an interesting question. i bet 'the falklands war' was always called that. and iirc 'the gulf war'. but what of our present wars. it's probably called 'the iraq war', but what about the war in afghanistan? doesn't have a real name.

I had a history teacher, echoing Churchill, who claimed that the Seven Years War (French & Indian War) was the first world war inasmuch as the hostilities occurred in Europe, the Mediterranean, the Atlantic, North America, the Carribean and India.

that has to be more 'worldy' than ww1 innit.

didn't know any of this

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woof, xpost-a-rama

For a while, when she heard W refer to the 'War on Terror', my gf had a tendency to affect the accent of Scarlet O'Hara and inquire what he had against Tara.

eh, the Iroquois Confederacy or those guys from TEH LAST OF TEH MOHICANS are hardly European powers. In India I understand that local forces were major players.

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(Sorry, Archel.)

They'll give it some trendy name like "Wr3.0 (beta)"

Repurposing thread for actual World War One talk as we're in the 100th anniversary year.

Obligatory: https://twitter.com/RealTimeWWI

Highly highly recommend the current "Blueprint for Armageddon" series in the Hardcore History podcast. Part 2 just went up last week.

Obviously, The Guns of August, Barbara Tuchman, needs prominent big-upping on this thread. When you finish reading it, you know why starting this bloody, pointless, enormously futile war seemed like such a compelling idea to so many people at the time.

An avalanche of recent publications. I need to read Max Hastings' book. I finished this three months ago.

o man thx for that twitter rec. npr had a similar thing for 1963 last year that was great.

planning to whip through a bunch of WWI books this year and decided to start with 'guns of august.' it's pretty much as good as everyone says, and actually really surprisingly laugh-out-loud funny in places, but the endless parade of unfamiliar names in the first 50 pages or so made me dizzy. i'm kind of thinking i need to read up on my late 19th century/early 20th century european history before i tackle another WWI tome.

like, everyone always says WWI is where everything starts, and they're probably right, but it's also the end of a thousand small rivalries and lingering conflicts that no one ever talks about anymore. tuchman doesn't even get into the balkans et al.

one thing that really struck me was how resigned so many highers-up in the german gov't at least were to the inevitability of war, to the point where they were arguing over whether it would be better to have a war THIS year or NEXT year.

THE SCHLIEFEN PLAN

sounds like a '60s caper movie with a huge international cast

might reread 'against the day'. or maybe just think abt it a lot

THE SCHLIEFEN PLAN

by Robert Ludlum.

The thread I wanted! I'm in the thick of reading about the war too. I read The Sleepwalkers by Christopher Clark on the origins, which despite the elegance of Clark's book are just dizzyingly hard to wrap your head around. The Great War and Modern Memory by Paul Fussell is a great compendium of literary tid-bits about soldiers' experiences in the trenches.

Just started Meyer's A World Undone - seems like the best follow-up to Tuchman so far.

Link to Hardcore History: http://www.dancarlin.com/disp.php/hharchive

Lots of quotable stuff in Clark's book. Here's his final statement concerning the lead-up to the July crisis before moving on to the Sarajevo assassination, arguing that war was still not inevitable despite the macro-level dynamics bringing the major powers into collision:

The future was still open - just. For all the hardening of the fronts in both of Europe's armed camps, there were signs that the moment for a major confrontation might be passing. The Anglo-Russian alliance was under serious strain - it looked unlikely to survive the scheduled date for renewal in 1915. And there were even signs of a change of heart among the British policy-makers, who has recently been sampling the fruits of détente with Germany in the Balkans. It is far from obvious or certain that Poincaré could have sustained his security policy over the longer term. There were even tentative signs of an improvement in relations between Vienna and Belgrade, as agreements were sought and found on the exchange of political prisoners and the settlement of the Eastern Railway question. Above all, none of the European powers was at this point contemplating launching a war of aggression against its neighbours. They feared such an initiative on each other's part, and as the military preparedness of the Entente soared, there was talk among the military in Vienna and Berlin of a pre-emptive strike to break the deadlock, but pre-emptive war had not become policy. Nor had Vienna resolved to invade Servia unprovoked - an act that would have amounted to geopolitical suicide. The system still needed to be ignited from outside itself, by means of the trigger that the Russians and French had established on the Austro-Serbian frontier. Had Pasic's Serbian government pursued a policy aimed at domestic consolidation and nipped in the bud the irredentist movement that posed as great a threat to its own authority as it did to the peace of Europe, the boys might never have crossed the river Drina, a more clear-cut warning might have been given in good time to Vienna, the shots might never have been fired. The interlocking commitments that produced the catastrophic outcome of 1914 were not long-term features of the European system, but the consequence of short-term adjustments that were themselves evidence of how swiftly relations among the powers were evolving.

And had the trigger not been pulled, the future that became history in 1914 would have made way for a different future, one in which, conceivably, the Triple Entente might not have survived the resolution of the Balkan crisis and the Anglo-German détente might have hardened into something more substantial. Paradoxically, the plausibility of the second future helped to heighten the probability of the first - it was precisely in order to avoid abandonment by Russia and to secure the fullest possible measure of support that France stepped up the pressure on St. Petersburg. Had the fabric of the alliances seemed more dependable and enduring, the key decision-makers might have felt less under pressure to act as they did. Conversely the moments of détente that were so characteristic of the last years before the war had a paradoxical impact: by making a continental war appear to recede to the horizons of probability, they encouraged key decision-makers to underrate the risks attending their interventions. This is one reason why the danger of a conflict between the great alliance blocs appeared to be receding, just as the chain of events that would ultimately drag Europe into war got underway.

http://ejf.cside.ne.jp/review/diplomacy.jpg

Relatedly, just read The Strange Death of Liberal England by George Dangerfield. It's a 30s book, in the Lytton Strachey line of beautifully styled ironies & character portraits; covers 1910-14 - rapid collapse of a Liberal consensus through the Tory revolt over the Lords, Irish home rule & unionist agitation, rising union militancy, suffragism. Ends with the war changing everything, of course, but not really about the war. Tons of magnificent passages.

It is customary to think of that society as a doomed thing, calling in the traditional doomed manner " for madder music and for stronger wine," and plunged at last, with no time to say its prayers, into the horrors of war. The scene may even be given some of the qualities of a pre-Raphaelite canvas. The sky is massed with tall black clouds ; but one last shaft of sunlight, intolerably bright, picks out every detail of leaf and grass ; and in the midst of it those little figures go through their paces with the momentary precision of a dream. There is, too, a satisfying irony in this : the spectator knows what is going to happen, the actors do not; they are almost in the happy condition of OEdipus and Jocasta, before the news arrived which made the unhappy gentleman remove his eyes. And the conception is, above all, a convenient one. It is easier to think of Imperial England, beribboned and bestarred and splendid, living in majestic profusion up till the very moment of war. Such indeed was its appearance, the appearance of a somewhat decadent Empire and a careless democracy. But I do not think that its social history will be written on these terms.

I like how Henry James and Sigmund Freud had such oppositely characteristic reactions to the outbreak of war, James experiencing it as a shattering of naiveté, Freud as a swelling of libido.

The plunge of civilization into the abyss of blood and darkness by the wanton feat of those two infamous autocrats is a thing that so gives away the whole long age during which we had supposed the world to be, with whatever abatement, gradually bettering, that to have to take it all now for what the treacherous years were all the while really making for meaning is too tragic for any words.

For the first time in thirty years, I feel myself to be an Austrian, and feel like giving this not very hopeful empire another chance. All my libido is dedicated to Austria-Hungary.

*"making for and meaning"

are there any WWI vets left? at all?