 We're involved in at least three different wars right now as we're meeting here today. And we are also just about exactly a hundred years from the moment when the United States entered the First World War. So I want to take just a few minutes to look back at that war and see what we can learn from it. The First World War, depending on how you count them, killed more than nine million soldiers and perhaps an even larger number of civilians. It was six times more deadly than the worst war Europe had known before then. It also left 21 million soldiers wounded. Many of them terribly so, missing arms, legs, noses, ears, genitals. And it left a kind of destruction behind it on the ground unlike any previous war in Europe. There was no distinction between military and civilian targets. As the armies surged back and forth across the continent, each time an army retreated, it would leave scorched earth behind it. Blowing up buildings, cutting down fruit trees, poisoning the wells, doing everything to render the land absolutely useless for the advancing army of the other side. There were further consequences of this war that were not immediately visible at the time. And the worst of them were put into effect by the man on the far right in this picture shown here with his World War I army unit. And if he, of course, twenty years later led the world into an even more destructive war and the Holocaust to boot. And it is hard to imagine the Second World War without the first and without the tremendous legacy of bitterness and resentment that the First World War left behind it. So going back to 1914, how could this terrible war start so easily? I think that, like all wars, including some recent ones, it started easily because it was based on some illusions. The first was the illusion of quick and easy victory. These are German students in Berlin marching off to war in 1914. Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany told them, you will be home, they marched off in August 1914. He said, you'll be home before the leaves fall from the trees. Here are German troops getting into a railway car and heading for the front. And as you can see on the side, it says to Paris. French soldiers, Frenchmen going off with equal enthusiasm to enlist also in August of 1914. There's their railway car and on the side it says to Berlin. A second illusion, I think, again, common to many wars is that when you went off to fight, you would be shooting at the enemy, but the enemy would not be shooting at you. How else can you explain the color of the uniforms that roughly three million French soldiers wore as they went to war in 1914? These are not the dress uniforms, these are the combat uniforms. And they were not the only army that was fond of bright red and blue. The Austro-Hungarian cavalry also loved those colors and didn't abandon them until two years under the war in 1916. The third illusion, I think, is that there was a magic weapon that was going to quickly decide the war. Everyone expected this to be the cavalry. When the Germans invaded France and Belgium in 1914, they did so with 40,000 men on horseback. And all of the armies had their cavalry troops. Here's a British cavalryman practicing for the great dramatic charges that everybody expected would quickly decide the war. Why this illusion about cavalry? I think because it had been a decisive factor in warfare for several thousand years. And it was also a major source of military glory because cavalry officers tended to get promoted much faster than those lowly foot soldiers. And people were simply unwilling to acknowledge that things had changed. And of course, several inventions changed it. One was barbed wire, and the other was the machine gun. So instead of those dramatic cavalry charges sweeping back and forth across the land, the armies in Western Europe bogged down on a front line that went roughly from the English Channel to the Swiss border. And for more than three years, it budged seldom more than a few miles in either direction. For example, the year 1916 saw several enormous attacks, 1915 saw several enormous attacks by the Allied armies, probably more than a total of more than a million men were killed and wounded on both sides. By the end of the year, the Allies had gained exactly eight square miles of ground. And instead of those glorious cavalry charges, men found themselves fighting in an absolutely devastated landscape. More than 700 million artillery shells and mortar rounds were fired on the Western front in that narrow strip of France and Belgium over four and a half years of war. And some of them are still going off today because there were duds that buried themselves in the earth. And when some unlucky farmer's plow or harrow hits it, off it goes 100 years later. Workers also found themselves sometimes fighting knee-deep in mud. The war also had a huge effect on civilian life because for four and a half years the governments on both sides had to keep up that fervor that was necessary to get the civilian population to man the munitions factories, produce weapons, and keep up the belief that winning the war was going to solve everything. There was a tremendous paranoia about spies on both sides, encouraged by the governments. One effect that it had in Britain and the United States was that any shop that had a German name on it, even if the family had immigrated from Germany two or three generations before, was liable to have its windows smashed or people taken out of the shop and beaten up. Tremendous anti-German mania in the United States, American towns changed their names, hamburger became Salisbury steak, German measles became Liberty measles. Another effect that the war had was that it generated enormous populations of refugees, more than six million by the end of the war. The refugees in this picture are Belgian and one of the things that they were fleeing as they fled the German occupation of their country was the prospect of being turned into forced laborers by the occupiers. This was something new also and it happened in occupied Europe on a vast scale. So many people tried to flee from being impressed as forced laborers that the Germans built an electrified fence on the border between Belgium and Holland, which was neutral, so that people couldn't flee across the border. They electrified the fence at 2,000 volts and several hundred people died trying to cross it. The point is that the war saw the beginnings of a kind of totalitarian control over the civilian population that really had not been there before. This would not of course be the last electrified border fence in Europe during the 20th century. The very madness of all this makes me want to celebrate in this anniversary season those who resisted the war at the time. They were there in all of the principal belligerent countries. In the United States Eugene Debs, the great labor leader, spoke out strongly against the war. For this he was sent to prison in 1918. He was still in prison in November 1920 when he received nearly a million votes for president on the socialist ticket. Another American who spoke out boldly against the war was the pioneer social worker Jane Adams. She was one of those who organized in 1915 in neutral Holland at the Hague a conference of women from both sides and from neutral countries. It's virtually the only time during those four and a half terrible years from which you can find photographs of people from the two sides speaking together on a lecture platform embracing each other, standing together. Here in the United States more than 500 Americans went to military prisons for refusing to fight and here are two of them at Fort Riley, Kansas. In Germany the great radical, libertarian radical, Rosa Luxemburg went to jail for her opposition to the war as did many other Germans. In France Jean Jauriz, the leader of the socialist party spoke out very strongly against the war he saw coming in 1914. A week before it began he went to an emergency conference of the leaders of Europe's left-wing parties in Brussels and he spoke to an enormous crowd and a big square there and put his arm around the shoulder of the leader of the German social democrats and said we will never make war on each other. He returned to France that night and because of what he had said three days later he was assassinated. Three days after that the war began. His assassin incidentally was held in prison during the war, put on trial when the war was over and found innocent because this was judged to be a crime of passion, a legal gimmick that traditionally has allowed men to get away with murdering women, in this case it was put to work for a different purpose and Jauriz's widow had to pay the court costs. Finally I want to end by looking at a different kind of resistance and remembering this a hundred years later which was the resistance among soldiers. The place where this was most pronounced was on the eastern front where Russia and Germany faced each other and once the Russian revolution happened all fighting came to a stop because the new government was committed to ending the war and in a way that horrified the generals Russian and German soldiers began fraternizing with each other. You can see in this picture the Russians are the ones with the fur hats the Germans are the others and there are many photographs like this from that time. Here's my favorite which is of Russian and German soldiers dancing in the snow in the winter of 1917-1918. This is how all wars ought to end but seldom do. Thank you.