FORWARD
I have written several books on war. I flew for three years in Vietnam and witnessed firsthand the terrible cost of military conflict. As Marc Antony declares in Julius Caesar, Act III, Scene I—“Cry ‘Havoc!’ and let slip the dogs of war”—once unleashed, the insanity begins. There is nothing so terrible as war. No one whose heart has been seared by its savagery believes there is honor or glory in it—there simply is not. War is hell.
Individual soldiers, however, have shown extraordinary courage, strength, and bravery. War can bring out the very best in some men. A soldier fights for his life and for the lives of his friends—not for the distant general commanding him to kill other men. Yet we all understand that deranged dictators and totalitarian regimes must be stopped, and—too often—the only way to stop them is by fighting and killing.
On June 28, 1914, near the Latin Bridge in Sarajevo, a madman set the world ablaze. Nineteen-year-old Gavrilo Princip murdered Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie with a Browning pistol. Arrested and sentenced to 20 years in prison, Princip died of tuberculosis in 1918. His act unleashed an unstoppable chain of events. Anti-Serb riots spread across Austria-Hungary, and one month later, on July 28, 1914, war was declared.
The conflict rapidly escalated, pitting the Triple Alliance (Austria-Hungary, Germany, and Italy) against the Triple Entente (Russia, France, and Britain). The momentum became irreversible, igniting one of the dumbest and bloodiest wars in human history. And World War I, in turn, set the stage for World War II just 22 years later—and enabled 70 years of brutal Soviet communism.
This book examines that catastrophic conflict and tells the story of a remarkable young British man murdered by it—a boy whose life should never have been lost. Sam Mason, killed at nineteen—one day before his twentieth birthday—died at the Battle of the Somme. A mathematical genius and true prodigy, Sam possessed a mind far beyond his contemporaries. The British government should never have permitted him to enlist. He was a national treasure. His potential to better the world was incalculable, yet tragically, we will never know what he might have achieved.
Sam became one of millions of bright, vibrant lives extinguished before their time by the collective madness of a senseless, avoidable war. In these pages, we attempt to grapple with that waste.
We discuss the instigators—the architects of this catastrophe—men who could have stopped the conflict at any moment but, for reasons that defy comprehension, accelerated it. Their decisions plunged the world into unprecedented carnage.
This book explains not only how World War I unfolded, but also how it inevitably gave rise to World War II and the seventy-year tyranny of the Soviet Union. The consequences of that first great folly spread across a century.
Robert J. Firth
Florida, September 2017
