Why did a prosperous continent, at the height of its success as a source and agent of global wealth and power and at one of the peaks of its intellectual and cultural achievement, choose to risk all it had won for itself and all it offered to the world in the lottery of a vicious and local internecine conflict?
The impulses of imperialism and militarism, directed at the rest of the world for centuries could not be contained. Those forces infected every government of Europe, blinding them with pride and delusion. The chickens come home to roost eventually.
