The Guns of August

Fritz Weaver relentlessly narrates the First World War, from the death of Edward VII of England through its conclusion with thirty-seven million dead, wounded, and missing. Based on Barbara Tuchman's book of the same name, it tells a tale of men of position and power confronted with situations they could not believe possible. From Austria-Hungary, granted everything in their ultimatum to Serbia, going to war regardless, through impeccably smooth operations of long-laid war plans, through the German belief that publishing their intentions to violate treaties believing this gave them sanction to do so, through a Belgian defense that destroyed those plans, through nations that had been screaming against war going unhesitating into battle, through men who had been retreating for ten days turning around onto the offensive, this movie chronicles those imbecilities. Men secure in their power were suddenly thrust into situations in which that power vanished. It was the end of the 19th Century, and the beginning of a 20th Century in which the old world vanished and a new, harsher world began.

More than a hundred years later, we are still living with the turmoil of those stupidities. Maybe it was a stupid world that got us into that fix. What have we done to repair it?