World War 1 Triumph or Tragedy?

This is a great question. I have been pondering the centenary date line as well for several months internally in thoughts and have been curious as to how Great Britain and France will proceed in marking the date as well.

Currently I am re-reading "All Quiet On The Western Front" as it is a story of historical importance for the ages. I am certain based on your own knowledge base of the Great War that you can see that the war to end all wars actually turned out to be the grandfather of all conflicts through the First Persian Gulf War of the 1990s. It sort of had the American Prohibition take on wars if you will, and what I mean by this is that where prohibition was supposed to make the USA an alcohol free society it created instead a bedlum of gangster activity that ended up making people crave their booze even more than before prohibition started. In essence the First World War was significant on many fronts - I have read many accounts of the Battle of the Somme (and other battles) and my heart still breaks over the many stories of the Brave British, Commonwealth, and French Forces where the Lost Generation would enter no mans land and never be seen or heard from again. The young troops of this generation should never be forgotten as their lives were wasted on the battlefields all over France and Belgium and until 1917 on the Eastern Front as well. The United States didn't come away unscathed but we certainly missed the first three years of this dreadful war that even still left a generation of Lost Boys in our country afterwards as well. It is no wonder that isolation took on the ugly hold that it did for such a long period of time afterwards.

I hope that Great Britain, the Commonwealth nations of Canada, New Zealand, Australia, and France will give a commemoration worthy of the sacrifice that was lost during these bloody 4.25 years of war. This at least is my hope.

In the end as I ponder your basic question I will say it was a Triumph that led to Tragedy due mostly to the political and economic environment it left as a vacuum afterwards.

A pointless slaughter so badly managed the whole thing had to be redone two decades later.

It was a tragedy, of course.

I suppose, though, it raises questions of things like, would we have ever moved to a welfare state if we hadn't had the world wars? Clearly Britian would be a different country (maybe Empire) altogether - but whether that is a good thing or a bad thing rather depends on your perspective.

It was obviously a tragedy for the 10 million soldiers and 7 million civilians who were killed.

There was certainly no 'triumph' in that millions of lives were affected, and in that the settlement imposed on Germany by the victorious nations almost guaranteed further conflict.

Obviously there were many stories of individual bravery which could be described as the triumph of human will over adversity.

An unavoidable tragedy. Germany was arming and was in a cold war against Britain. Europe was at the tipping point with various countries wanting to expand, the Austro-Hungarian Empire was in chaos with mass social unrest across it, the Russian Empire was on the brink of revolution, the Germans wanted to expand and take over Europe... Britain didn't want threats to its position and had various alliances with small countries near Germany such as Belgium. WW1 was unavoidable, it was final clash between the monarchies of Europe.

All war is tragedy.

dulce et decorum est.

bent double like old beggers under sacks

we did got medals for it