To make matters worse, because of the long peace, hardly any of the European statesmen or diplomats who gambled away the lives of a generation had personal experience of combat. The aged Francis Joseph remembered the horrors of the blood-soaked field of Solferino, but most of his younger contemporaries, in every European nation, and at every administrative level, were as blind to the human and moral implications of modern war as they were ignorant of its technical imperatives.
