Echoes of Great War reverberate to this day

If you had been in one of those cold, wet trenches on the Western Front, bracing yourself to go “over the top” into the face of machine-gun fire, how would you want future generations to honour your potential death?

Well, having spent a lot of time between attacks listening to cries for help from No Man’s Land, you’d probably not be satisfied with occasional remembrances of your sacrifice.

Rather, you’d want future generations to figure out what happened, with a view to making sure the Armageddon you were living through at least became the War To Make Wars a Lot Less Likely.

And today — just three days shy of the 100th anniversary of Austria-Hungary declaring war on Serbia, starting the First World War — it’s fair to say this is a debt posterity hasn’t properly paid.

On July 28, 1914, Emperor Franz Joseph of Austria-Hungary made that move in response to the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the throne, by a Serb fanatic exactly one month earlier in Sarajevo.

A century later, we humans are still playing the same game of Blind Man’s Bluff that needlessly made Europe a powder keg. In eastern Ukraine and the Middle East — as it happens, two of many hot spots around the world with roots in the outcome of the 1914-18 war — leaders are still making risky calculations about what they can get away with without catastrophic blowback.

Yes, we all know the famous assassination on June 28, 1914 was like the lit match that burned down the city. But why was the house at Ground Zero a fire hazard in the first place? Why was there no firefighter to pour water before things got out of hand? And why were the surrounding houses so vulnerable?

In school, we learn that one culprit was an interlocking system of alliances. This makes it sound like the war was an accident.

Blame is laid at the door of the Germans’ Schlieffen Plan, which led Berlin to pre-emptively attack France if it found itself facing war with France’s ally, Russia. This makes it sound as if the blame rests solely with the enemy.

A third explanation is that people didn’t know how the new weapons of the time would favour defence. This makes policy-makers sound like 12-year-olds who didn’t know the window would break.

But history makes clear that a century of peace and progress was methodically destroyed by incompetent calculations and bad choices on all sides, by elite policy-makers who seem to have worried more about how they would look to their peers in other capitals.

The interlocking alliances were formed to reduce the danger. But for complex reasons, they sometimes made it worse. For example, a British policy of tentative support for Russia and France, designed to worry the Germans without making a firm commitment, ended up persuading the Germans that Britain wouldn’t fight — and the French that Britain would.

We do not mean to argue that when the time came, decisions for war in the summer of 1914 by Britain or Canada were a mistake, much less hint that the actions of the soldiers who fought in the trenches were not incredibly brave and selfless.

But we must understand what went wrong, we must understand that everyone had choices and we must ask in hindsight whether different choices might have been better.

If you were the ghost of a Great War soldier, watching a population that likely spends more time in a day analyzing the failures of sports teams than it does in a decade contemplating the causes of the greatest human calamity of our time, you’d say:

“That’s not good enough. I died face down in mud at the age of 19. You owe me more.”