Why 1914 Happened and Why 1919 Failed

The idea

This unit asked two questions, and the anchor's answers are one answer. Why nineteen fourteen: the great powers had lived forty years without a European war and had built, in that time, everything that made the next one unstoppable. Alliances turned a Bosnian assassination into a continental mobilization within five weeks. Million-man armies and general staffs turned mobilization into a timetable no government could pause. Imperial rivalry and a naval race had taught the powers to distrust each other; nationalism, taught by newspapers to electorates, made backing down political death. Nobody wanted the war; everybody risked it; nobody knew that the Maxim gun and the trench had made attack impossible. So the plans failed at the Marne, the war became holes and attrition, and it was decided by exits and entries: Russia out in seventeen, America in the same year, Germany's last offensive spent by July eighteen and its home front broken by blockade and turnips. Why nineteen nineteen failed: the victors met in private, kept the points that redrew Germany's map and dropped the points that bound themselves, gave the Ottoman lands to Britain and France as mandates, and assigned Germany guilt and a bill it could not pay while leaving it intact. Germany's generals had already written the myth that explained defeat as betrayal. Three empires fell and their peoples got states drawn by diplomats. The League was born without its founder. The anchor's verdict, attributed: the causes were worsened, not resolved. Unit fifteen begins with the exit that changed the century, Russia's.