Fascinating OP.
There’s no doubt, 1914 began a sequence of difficult times....
"Half a century has gone by, yet the mark that the tragedy of the Great War left on the body and soul of the nations has not faded . . . nothing left was the same as before. Society in its entirety: systems of government, national borders, laws, armed forces, interstate relations, but also ideologies, family life, fortunes, positions, personal relations—everything was changed from top to bottom. . . . Humanity finally lost its balance, never to recover it to this day.” (General Charles de Gaulle, Le Monde, Nov. 12, 1968, p. 9)
“Those who lived through the war could never rid themselves of the belief that one world had ended and another begun in August 1914.” (The Generation of 1914, Robert Wohl, Professor of History)
“The whole world really blew up about World War I and we still don’t know why. Before then, men thought that utopia was in sight. There was peace and prosperity. Then everything blew up. We’ve been in a state of suspended animation ever since . . . More people have been killed in this century than in all of history.” (Dr. Walker Percy, American Medical News, November 21, 1977)
“Everything would get better and better. This was the world I was born in. . . . Suddenly, unexpectedly, one morning in 1914 the whole thing came to an end.” (British statesman Harold Macmillan, The New York Times, November 23, 1980)
“The last completely ‘normal’ year in history was 1913, the year before World War I began.” (Times-Herald, Washington, D.C., March 13, 1949)
“In 1914 the world lost a coherence which it has not managed to recapture since. . . . This has been a time of extraordinary disorder and violence, both across national frontiers and within them.” (The Economist)
“The Great War of 1914-18 lies like a band of scorched earth dividing that time from ours. In wiping out so many lives which would have been operative on the years that followed, in destroying beliefs, changing ideas, and leaving incurable wounds of disillusion, it created a physical as well as psychological gulf between two epochs.” (Foreword to The Proud Tower, by Barbara W. Tuchman)
“Ever since 1914, everybody conscious of trends in the world has been deeply troubled by what has seemed like a fated and predetermined march toward ever greater disaster. Many serious people have come to feel that nothing can be done to avert the plunge towards ruin.” (Bertrand Russell, The New York Times Magazine, September 27, 1953)
“[There was] little or no evidence of a steady rise or a ‘snowballing’ of conflicts and tensions leading directly to the outbreak of war.” On the contrary, “by late 1913 and early 1914 . . . relations among the major powers appeared to be more settled than they had been for many years.” (International Crisis, by Eugenia Nomikos and Robert C. North, 1976)
“The year 1913 marked the close of an era.” (1913 - An End and a Beginning, Virginia Cowles)
“Before 1914 the monetary and the financial systems were compatible. . . . If one takes August 1914 as marking the dividing line between them, the contrasts between the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries are striking. In many aspects of human affairs there has been a complete reversal of trend. . . . One major reason was the severance of the linkage between the financial system and money with intrinsic value that began in 1914. . . . The breaking of the linkage was a momentous event. . . . 1914 marked a radical, and in the end catastrophic, transformation of that system.” (Ashby Bladen, senior vice president The Guardian Life Insurance Company of America)
“By all contemporaneous accounts, the world prior to 1914 seemed to be moving irreversibly toward higher levels of civility and civilization; human society seemed perfectible. The nineteenth century had brought an end to the wretched slave trade. Dehumanizing violence seemed on the decline. . . . The pace of global invention had advanced throughout the nineteenth century, bringing railroads, the telephone, the electric light, cinema, the motor car, and household conveniences too numerous to mention. Medical science, improved nutrition, and the mass distribution of potable water had elevated life expectancy . . . The sense of the irreversibility of such progress was universal.
“World War I was more devastating to civility and civilization than the physically far more destructive World War II: the earlier conflict destroyed an idea. I cannot erase the thought of those pre-World War I years, when the future of mankind appeared unencumbered and without limit. Today our outlook is starkly different from a century ago but perhaps a bit more consonant with reality. Will terror, global warming, or resurgent populism do to the current era of life-advancing globalization what World War I did to the previous one? No one can be confident of the answer.” (Alan Greenspan, The Age of Turbulence: Adventures in a New World, 2007)
“Those who have an adult’s recollection and an adult’s understanding of the world which preceded World War I look back upon it with a great nostalgia. There was a sense of security then which has never since existed.”(Professor Benjamin M. Anderson, Economics and the Public Welfare)
“Historic events are often said to have ‘changed everything.’ In the case of the Great War this is, for once, true. The war really did change everything: not just borders, not just governments and the fate of nations, but the way people have seen the world and themselves ever since. It became a kind of hole in time, leaving the postwar world permanently disconnected from everything that had come before.” (A World Undone, G. J. Meyer, 2006)
“The outbreak of the war in 1914 is the great turning point of the history of humanity. . . . We entered an age of disaster, horror, and hatred, with insecurity everywhere.” (Peter Munch, Danish historian)
“Everywhere, the standards of social behavior—already in decline—were devastated...if the politicians and generals had treated the millions under their care like animals dispatched to slaughter, then what canons of religion or ethics could any longer inhibit men from treating each other with the ferocity of jungle beasts? . . . The slaughter of the First World War thoroughly debased the value of human life.” (Norman Cantor, The Outline of History)
[Following the acceptance of the evolution theory] “areal de-moralization ensued...Man, they decided, is a social animal like the Indian hunting dog . . . , so it seemed right to them that the big dogs of the human pack should bully and subdue.” (H. G. Wells, 1920)
“The Christian Churches are the finest blood-lust creators which we have and of them we made free use.” (Frank Crozier, British Brigadier General)
“Increasingly, the 75-year period from 1914 to 1989, covering two world wars and the cold war, is being seen by historians as a single, discrete epoch, a time apart in which much of the world was fighting war, recovering from war or preparing for war.” (The New York Times, May 7, 1995)
“Security and quiet have disappeared from the lives of men since 1914.” (Konrad Adenauer, German statesman, The West Parker, Cleveland, Ohio, January 20, 1966)
“The 1914-18 war that destroyed the 19th century is not over...The 19th century—defined as a set of beliefs, assumptions, attitudes and morals—did not end on Jan. 1, 1901...it ended in 1914. That’s also when the 20th century, defined the same way, began...Virtually all of the conflicts that we have been concerned with all of our lives stemmed from that [first world] war...Nearly all of the intellectual and cultural currents that we have lived with were born out of that war.”
“I think it did such damage because it shattered people’s belief that humans can control their destiny. . . . The war disabused people of that belief.” (Charley Reece, The Orlando Sentinel)
“Looking back from the vantage point of the present we see clearly today that the outbreak of World War I ushered in a twentieth-century ‘Time of Troubles’—from which our civilization has by no means yet emerged.” (The Fall of the Dynasties, Edmond Taylor quoting British historian Arnold Toynbee)
“It is indeed the year 1914 rather than that of Hiroshima which marks the turning point in our time, for by now we can see that . . . it was the first world war that ushered in the era of confused transition in the midst of which we are floundering.” (Dr. René Albrecht-Carrié, Barnard College, The Scientific Monthly, July 1951)
“The onset of the twentieth century was hailed in many commentaries as the real beginning of the Age of Reason. . . . Contrary to its promise, the twentieth century became mankind’s most bloody and hateful century, a century of hallucinatory politics and of monstrous killings. Cruelty was institutionalized to an unprecedented degree, lethality was organized on a mass production basis. The contrast between the scientific potential for good and the political evil that was actually unleashed is shocking. Never before in history was killing so globally pervasive, never before did it consume so many lives, never before was human annihilation pursued with such concentration of sustained effort on behalf of such arrogantly irrational goals.” (Out of Control—Global Turmoil on the Eve of the Twenty-First Century, 1993, Zbigniew Brzezinski, former head of the U.S. National Security Council)
“The four years that followed [1914]...were four years of the most intense and heroic effort the human race has ever made.’ When the effort was over, illusions and enthusiasms possible up to 1914 slowly sank beneath a sea of massive disillusionment. For the price it had paid, humanity’s major gain was a painful view of its own limitations.” (Graham Wallas, co-founder London School of Economics)
“It may be that, after the seeming inevitability of two world wars, the creation of nuclear weapons was an admonitory gift, which spared us a third clash of great nations and introduced the longest period of general peace, albeit a peace of terror, since Victorian times. . . . What had gone wrong with humanity? Why had the promise of the nineteenth century been dashed? Why had the twentieth century turned into an age of horror or, as some would say, evil?” (A History of the Modern World—From 1917 to the 1980s, Paul Johnson)
“In the Second World War every bond between man and man was to perish. Crimes were committed by the Germans under the Hitlerite domination to which they allowed themselves to be subjected which find no equal in scale and wickedness with any that have darkened the human record. . . . We have at length emerged from a scene of material ruin and moral havoc the like of which had never darkened the imagination of former centuries.” (The Gathering Storm, Volume I of The Second World War, Winston S. Churchill)
“Like a ghost that lingered past the appointed hour, the nineteenth century—with its essential orderliness, its self-confidence, and its faith in human progress—had tarried until August 1914, when the major European powers suffered a collective attack of muddleheadedness that led directly to the senseless slaughter of millions of the best young men of a generation. Four and a half years later, as the world tried to pick up the pieces after the wrenching cataclysmof the Great War, it became apparent to many (but by no means all) contemporary observers that the last remaining vestiges of the old order had been swept away, and that mankind had entered a new age that was considerably less rational and less forgiving of human imperfections. Those who had expected peace to usher in a better world found their hopes betrayed in 1919.” (1919—The Year Our World Began, William K. Klingaman)
