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the people of my country have ever had to endure." He points out that one of the Kaiser's principal war aims was to establish a pan-European customs union, a "United States of Europe," which Germany, by its size, would dominate. How different is that, he asks provocatively, from today's European Union? Germany was indeed the aggressor in 1914, but would a German conquest of France then—something that had already happened once, in 1870–71—have been so disastrous? Whatever brutalities or shifts in the balance of power this would have caused, Ferguson argues, seem paltry compared to the war's death toll and catastrophic aftereffects, above all the rise of Nazism.

To this we can add that the war of 1914–1918 left a wider legacy as well. For example, the unprecedented, massive government propaganda operations on both sides, filled with false claims of glorious battlefield victories and wild exaggerations of the other side's atrocities, engendered a deep postwar cynicism—a cynicism that years later made many people first dismiss as propaganda the early reports of Nazi death camps. More important yet, the war smashed many barriers in the realm of what most Europeans considered morally permissible. In the frenzy for military advantage, international agreements and the long-standing distinction between soldiers and civilians went up in smoke: chemical warfare by both sides, German torpedoing of neutral ships, the British attempt to blockade Germany into starvation—the list could go on. And these barriers, once broken, were gone forever. The barbed-wire-ringed camps in Germany for laborers conscripted from France, Belgium, and Russia would be duplicated in far larger and crueler dimensions by the Nazis and the Soviets. The Turkish genocide of the Armenians would be repeated, on a vaster scale, against Europe's Jews. The poison gas attacks foreshadowed the gruesome toll in birth defects from the American spraying of defoliants across South Vietnam. The indiscriminate German bombings of British and French cities would be replicated by both sides, with an immensely greater death toll, in the Second World War, reaching a climax in the atomic leveling of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The unexpected aristocratic dissenter of 1917, Lord Lansdowne, was entirely right to see that the war had irrevocably unleashed "the prostitution of science for purposes of pure destruction."

Would we have devised such means of inflicting pain, terror, and death without the First World War? Probably yes, for human beings have been inventing new ways to kill each other for thousands of years. But the scale of the conflict and the way the belligerents mobilized their economies for total war accelerated such developments greatly, and left a bloodied Germany determined to seek revenge. The most toxic legacy of the conflict and its misbegotten peace settlement lies in the hardly imaginable horrors that followed. If we were allowed to magically roll back history to the start of the twentieth century and undo one—and only one—event, is there any doubt that it would be the war that broke out in 1914?

On a warm, sunny day in Ypres, the land seems at peace. Just outside of town, a farmer on his tractor says, yes, a visitor can certainly step inside one of the seven half-buried British bunkers on his property, their rounded concrete roofs bearing the ribbed imprint of corrugated iron. They now house a flock of bleating baby goats, who rush out, frightened by the sound of approaching footsteps. A few miles away, a German trench has been carefully reconstructed, with wattle holding the sides firm, duckboards on the bottom, a rim of sandbags along the parapet. The nearby small villages like Passchendaele, whose very names were once synonymous with mass death, are now filled with old men chatting in sidewalk cafés, leafy town squares with bandstands, schoolchildren heading home with leather bookbags, shops selling Belgian chocolates. The air smells of fresh-cut grass. Every road is so well paved, every street so clean, every red-roofed home with its window boxes of bright