Intrepid reporter for Mental Floss Magazine, Eric Sass, has undertaken the absorbing and challenging task of documenting the upcoming centennial of the Great War, day-by-day as events unfolded a hundred years past.
Most place World War I, on the European stage and brimming worldwide, from 1914 to 1918, and while those future anniversaries will be cause for reflection, this dreadful conflict began with a chain of events that precedes and maybe predicts the horrendous destruction. As the terror, heroism and lessons that can’t always permeate human denseness sadly cycle from living to historical memory, it is vital that we try to understand the background that created the environment and war-waging that does not only hinge on mechanisms that one can imagine going one way or another. There are easy answers and trigger-moments but I think tantalizingly accessible answers obscure more founding sentiment, like the waning influence of the Ottoman Empire and the imperial scramble to gainsay bridges and islands—colonies and wedges of control. I think this author and others will be able to faithfully pull together accounts and archives to cover the impulses and drives behind the outstanding course of human events and this looks to be a project to follow.
