When the guns on the western front fell silent on November 11, 1918, there had been fifty months of unprecedented slaughter and destruction. The Great War was the longest European armed struggle in more than a century, and it resulted in more than eight million fatalities (Bouthoul and Carrère, 1976:211), millions more maimed, and vast property and industrial destruction throughout Belgium and northeast France.

For most Europeans, the Great War had been a source of disillusionment. The nineteenth-century assumption of the moral and material progress of civilization was shattered. Those who had thought that, thanks to the invention of new weapons systems, future wars would be rapid and decisive learned that more probably they would develop into deathly stalemates. Those who had thought that international institutions, including the Hague Conventions, the Concert mechanisms, and the growing interdependence of societies through trade, investment, and communications, would guarantee peace learned that they were ineffective. And those, including Woodrow Wilson, who had admired Germany for its contributions to science, technology, art, literature, and music also learned that such a civilized society could arrogantly violate international norms and treaties, seek unprecedented imperial expansion in Europe (as revealed by the vast territorial gains made at the expense of Russia and Romania in the Treaties of Brest-Litovsk and Bucharest), and attempt to establish for itself a position of continental and possibly global hegemony.