Free Republic

The first world war, George Kennan wrote decades after it ended, was the ur‑catastrophe of the 20th century. The first conflict among industrialized global powers killed 10 million soldiers and mutilated over 21 million more. Both the war and the peace that followed have marked our world in indelible ways. Especially Europe. The deaths of more than 110,000 Americans in uniform, half to the Spanish flu, were equivalent to just one-quarter of the death toll in the French army alone during the first four months of the war. Europe suffered a bloodbath such as the world had never seen. Two...

The standard view of World War I is that it is a testament to the futility of war. Yet maybe the better way to think of the war, which lasted from 1914 to 1918—including American participation in 1917-1918—is that if war comes, it’s better to win than to lose. [...] Most of the chronicling of that war is heavy on mournfulness, along with the implication that war solves nothing. Hence we see headlines such as “The Tragic Futility of World War I” and “The Most Unnecessary War in History.” Still, we are left to wonder: If the war was “futile”...

ARLINGTON, Va. - At 11 a.m. Greenwich Mean Time on Nov. 11, 1918 ("the eleventh hour of the eleventh month"), an Armistice took place between the Allied and Central powers across all battle zones. It marked the beginning of the steps that would bring the First World War to an end. The efforts of the National Guard were pivotal to Allied success in obtaining this goal of ending the bloody and futile war. The Guard engaged in combat for the first time ever with the official name of "National Guard." In the War, forces fought alongside them from both the...

This is no ordinary Remembrance Day in the Commonwealth and much of Europe, and Veterans Day in the United States. Today we mark the one hundredth anniversary of the Armistice that brought to an end the most terrible war in history. Exactly a century ago - on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month - the guns fell silent on Europe's battlefields. The belligerents had agreed the terms of the peace at 5am that November morning, and the news was relayed to the commanders in the field shortly thereafter that hostilities would cease at eleven o'clock....

Alexander Solzhenitsyn had once asked why, in 1914, a Europe "bursting with health and abundance" had "fallen into a rage of self-mutilation"; and the Russian writer offered the same explanation as he did for all the disasters of the early 20th century: man had "forgotten God". Anyone will agree that there was a decline in the importance of religion during and after the first world war. Theocratically-based regimes, notably the Russian and Ottoman empires, were replaced by secular ones. In western Europe, Protestant and Catholic clergy struggled to explain the seemingly senseless horrors of the war to their flock. It...

Heads of states and governments attend ceremonies to mark the 100th anniversary of the signing of the Armistice which brought the First World War to a close. Watch live Sunday, Nov. 11 at 4am ET.

The eleventh, day of the eleventh month is either today or tomorrow depending on where you live.

As they awaken on the morning of November 11 1918, along the 400-mile Western Front from Switzerland in the south to the Belgian coast in the north, nearly 10 million men on both sides know from developments over recent days that an armistice is imminent. They are praying for a swift end to the war. What they are not aware of yet is that at 5.20am in the Compiegne Forest just north of Paris, on the private train of Marshal Foch, commander-in-chief of the Allied armies, the Armistice agreement was signed after three days of negotiation. The war is entering...

More than 60 heads of state and government are converging on France for the commemorations that will crescendo Sunday with ceremonies at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Paris on the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month, exactly a century after the armistice.

The Great War of 1914-1918 was the defining event of our time: a lost generation of millions dead or maimed; mournful widows and orphans; empires toppled and nations shattered; Western civilization damaged; vast treasures sacrificed. And in war's aftermath, democracies stillborn and totalitarianism and vengeance enthroned. How did it happen? Keegan, despite his vast expertise, confesses that even when one knows what happened, it is difficult to explain why. "The First World War is a mystery. Its origins are mysterious. So is its course. Why did a prosperous continent, at the height of its success as a source and agent...

An atheist group claims the Maryland 'Peace Cross' is unconstitutionalThe Supreme Court has announced that it will hear oral arguments this term to consider if a 40-foot cross in Maryland endorses religion or is simply a secular memorial. The cross in question sits at a busy intersection in the Washington suburb of Bladensburg, Maryland, and memorializes soldiers who died in World War I. Last year, the 4th US Circuit Court of Appeals based in Richmond, Virginia, ruled 2-1 that the 93-year-old monument is unconstitutional and must be removed or destroyed. “(It) has the primary effect of endorsing religion and excessively...

German Chancellor Angela Merkel will mark the 100th anniversary of the end of World War I on French soil, and German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier will be in London at a ceremony in Westminster Abby with Queen Elizabeth II. But while the leaders visit the capitals of Germany's wartime enemies, at home there are no national commemorations planned for the centenary of the Nov. 11 armistice that brought an end to the four-year war that killed more than 2 million of its troops and left 4 million wounded. Next week, German parliament is holding a combined commemoration of the 100th anniversary...

Did the horrors of the Great War cause Canadian soldiers to lose their faith? Or is it true that there were no atheists in the trenches? The war has generally been seen as a powerfully disillusioning experience. Books such as Paul Fussell’s widely influential The Great War and Modern Memory portray the war as the origins of modern skepticism and cynicism. The idea of a “lost generation” of disillusioned Anglo-American vets is a widely accepted one. The situation in Canada, however, is a little more ambiguous. In his study of the war’s impact on Canadian culture, Death So Noble, Jonathan...

Donald Trump is to hold meetings with Vladimir Putin and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in Paris as world leaders arrive in western Europe for ceremonies to mark 100 years since the end of the first world war. Emmanuel Macron, the French president and host for the armistice ceremonies in Paris on 11 November, hopes to use the emotion of the occasion to warn that a nationalist resurgence led by authoritarian leaders – an outcome of the flawed ending of the first world war – will threaten liberal democracies and the institutions of multilateralism, the chief outcome of the second world war....

They worked in brothels frequented by troops serving on the front line in northern France, but their role has been virtually erased from the history books. Thanks to a new Roundhouse art project, Cause and Effect, to mark the centenary of the end of the conflict, the wartime sex workers have been immortalised in a film with poet Hollie McNish. McNish worked with historian Clare Makepeace from Birkbeck, University of London, to create War’s Whores, which details the “significant minority” of men paying for sex on the front line.

In the land of religious history, Philip Jenkins towers like a giant. Here, we discuss the religious dimension of World War I and his newest book, “The Great and Holy War: How World War I Became a Religious Crusade.” RNS: You say that World War I was “a religious crusade.” This sounds like a scandalous idea. Can you explain what you mean? PJ: If I myself believed that it was a crusade, that would indeed be scandalous. Actually, I am arguing that a great many people at the time saw it in those terms, which is also scandalous, in a...

A nineteenth century cannon sits at the entrance of a Pakistani village, the huge monument casts a striking silhouette against the dust and cobble alleyways of the small agricultural village. Nestled in the rocky hills of Punjab's salt ranges, blasted by heat in the summer, the village of Dulmial is a far cry from the freezing mud of the Flanders trenches. Locally, Dulmial is now known simply as the 'village with the gun' but when the man who uncovered the horrors, and heroics that the cannon symbolized, first saw it, it meant nothing to him, The Telegraph reports.

World War I was one of the major events that shook mankind. Originated in Europe, the war lasted from July, 1914 to November, 1918. Filmmakers across the globe have tried to capture the essence of the events that changed the world forever. As First World War marks a century, here are 5 films that delved deep into what happened among the warring nations and how it affected the humanity at large. Paths of Glory The film starring Kirk Douglas as Colonel Dax is a narration of a soldier’s dilemma while motivating others for a bloody war. Douglas plays the commanding...

Today is the 100th anniversary of Armistice Day, 11 November 1918, when at the 11th hour, of the 11th day, of the 11th month, the First World War came to an end after more than four years of carnage. (Armistice Day became Veterans' Day in 1954.) Described by British historian Corelli Barnett as a war that had "causes but no objectives, "the "Great War" left a legacy of disillusionment in its wake and made a shambles of the rest of the 20th century. All told, there were ten million military dead and seven million civilians killed. The resulting economic collapse,...

In the end, the guns fell silent at the appointed hour: 11 a.m. on the 11th of November, the 11th month of the year 1918. For four brutal years Europe -- and much of the rest of the world -- had been first drawn into and then fully involved in the most ferocious conflict in history up to that time. A war that began almost accidentally, with the assassination of the Austro-Hungarian Archduke Franz Ferdinand in the Balkan backwater of Sarajevo, soon morphed into a domino-toppling series of alliances and ententes, from which no nation or empire emerged unscathed. Nineteenth-century...