A hundred years ago

Delanceyplace.com has a selection from A World Undone: The Story of the Great War 1914 to 1918 by G.J. Meyer:

World leaders in 1914 did not understand how powerful their armies had become and how much destruction they would cause. In the centuries before the 1800s, world population had grown at a snail's pace. But between 1870 and the beginning of the first World War, the population of Europe had increased by a hundred million, more than the total world population before 1650, the result of a technological revolution that improved life spans. But this technological revolution also produced unprecedented weaponry, and thus World War One unleashed destruction that would kill over eight million (photo, top) and wound in excess of twenty million more, many times the casualties of all the Napoleonic wars combined. As the war started, a young and naive Winston Churchill, then First Lord of the Admiralty, could not contain his excitement:

Russia's general mobilization... called up the Russian reserves, a staggering total of four million men, enough to frighten any nation on earth.

This was war on a truly new scale; the army with which Wellington defeated Napoleon at Waterloo had totaled sixty thousand men.The Germans hauled into Belgium two new kinds of monster artillery: 30.5cm Skoda siege mortars (photo, bottom), plus an almost unimaginably huge 420cm howitzer produced by Germany's Krupp steelworks, that weighed seventy-five tons and had to be transported by rail in five sections and set in concrete before going into action. Among the holders of high office, one man at least did not share the sense of glum foreboding: the ebullient young Winston Churchill; he wrote to Prime Minister Asquith's wife: 'I love this war. I know it's smashing and shattering the lives of thousands every moment, and yet, I can't help it; I enjoy every second of it.'