Europe Prepares to Commemorate Centenary of World War I

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By ALAN COWELLAUG. 4, 2014

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Members of historical societies stand under a shower of a million poppies, representing those killed in World War One, at a ceremony at the Tank Museum in Bovington, England. CreditPeter Macdiarmid/Getty Images

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    RELATED COVERAGETo echo those words, Prime Minister David Cameron has urged Britons to extinguish the lights in their homes at 10 p.m. on Monday to leave a lone light or candle burning by 11 p.m. — the precise moment of the declaration of war on Germany.

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    A 100-Year Legacy of World War I
    World War I demolished empires and destroyed kings, kaisers and sultans. It introduced chemical weapons and aerial bombing. It brought women into the work force and hastened their legal right to vote.


    At 10 Downing Street, a single candle will be left burning on the doorstep. At Westminster Abbey, at a late-night ceremony attended by political leaders, a lone oil lamp at the tomb of the unknown soldier is to be extinguished at 11 p.m.

    “Sixteen million people perished in World War I,” Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg of Britain said in a statement, noting that the conflict was “a war which still shapes the world as it is today.”

    The fighting erupted after a series of interlocked events beginning with the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife, Sophie, on June 28, 1914 — a killing that prompted a series of alliances that historians have described as Europe’s stumbling or sleepwalking into a cataclysmic conflict.

    With war approaching, “most were stumbling into the darkness, increasingly bound by the chains of their own and others’ making, their hope of avoiding war ever fading,” the Very Rev. John Hall, the dean of Westminster Abbey, said in a foreword to the order of service on Monday.

    Neutral at the beginning, the United States formally joined the war in 1917. By the time of the armistice of Nov. 11, 1918, empires had crumbled and the world map was redrawn.

    The writer H. G. Wells is often credited with coining the description of the conflict as “the war that will end war,” the title of an essay that became a jingoistic catchphrase, “the war to end all wars.” As the conflict drew to a close, a more cynical view overtook that sentiment when David Lloyd George, the British prime minister at the time, is said to have remarked: “This war, like the next war, is a war to end war.”

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    You've got to love how David Cameron rewrites history.At the outbreak of World War I, Great Britain had colonies all over the world. The...

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    The scale of commemoration in Russia was unusual. Moscow usually focuses most of its commemorative efforts on World War II. The events in 1914 molded some of the crises of 2014 in the Middle East and Europe, which trace their roots to conflicts decades ago.

    “There were important principles at stake,” Mr. Cameron said before a service of commemoration at Glasgow Cathedral in Scotland attended by reprersentatives of the Commonwealth, a body made up largely of former British colonies in an empire that survived World War I but began to dissolve after World War II.

    Those principles, Mr. Cameron said, were “that there shouldn’t be the domination of Europe by one power, that small countries had a right to their independence and their existence, and these are problems that still confront us today and some of these problems are actually the consequences of the conflicts of the 20th century — the First World War and the Second World War.”

    Melissa Eddy contributed reporting from Berlin, and Neil MacFarquhar from Moscow.


    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/05/world/europe/europe-prepares-to-mark-centenary-of-world-war-i.html?smid=fb-nytimes&WT.z_sma=WO_EPC_20140804&bicmp=AD&bicmlukp=WT.mc_id&bicmst=1388552400000&bicmet=1420088400000&_r=2
 
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