Jay Winter is one of the greatest historians of the First World War. His Documentary Video series,  The Great War and the Shaping of the 20th Century (1996, 8 videos on YouTube) is one of the finest documentaries I've ever seen. It got me deeply into the war (I'm watching it for the fifth time now).

Professor Winters concludes the documentary as follows:

The war solved no problems. Its effects, both immediate and indirect, were either negative or disastrous. Morally subversive, economically destructive, socially degrading, confused in its course, futile in its result, it is the outstanding example in European history of meaningless conflict.

Watching the video and having studied the war for my entire life, I agree with this assessment. The war produced no practical results or positive achievements. It was confused and degrading and futile--and a monumental wastage of human life, human energy and material goods. 

Yet it was not meaningless. This is a dimension or aspect that many historians do not focus upon. The meaning of the First World War was precisely in the killing and dying. Sacrificial death testified to the existence of nations. For combatants of each nation, killing and dying was the way in which they expressed their devotion to their nation.

P. H. Pearse--founder of the Irish Revolutionary movement--sums it up nicely.

The last sixteen months have been the most glorious in the history of Europe. Heroism has come back to the earth. It is good for the world to be warmed with the red wind of the battlefield. Such august home was never before offered to God as this--the home of millions of lives given gladly for love of country.

MILLIONS OF LIVE GIVEN GLADLY--was the purpose of the war. The photo below sums up this purpose.

Richard Koenigsberg

rak@libraryofsocialscience.com