Perverse as it may seem to say so, World War I was also “the great war for peace.” The death of ten million soldiers and forty million civilians, at a price tag of $200 billion (more than $3 trillion by today’s reckoning), made the old warnings of the peace movement about the stakes of conflict seem both justified and prescient—once war fever passed. Over the course of its terrible four years of death, what had been a marginal agenda became central to national life everywhere and global diplomacy forever, beyond the wildest dreams of earlier generations of activists.
