Photograph by Galerie Bilderwelt/Getty.

A hundred years ago yesterday, Germany invaded Belgium and, in the famous words attributed to Sir Edward Grey, the British foreign secretary, the lamps went out all over Europe. In a sense, the lights didn’t come back on for almost half a century, during which the continent witnessed two catastrophic wars, revolution, a pandemic, hyperinflation, a depression, fascism, communism, genocide, military occupation, and, finally, post-war reconstruction, culminating in the 1957 Treaty of Rome, which created the European Economic Community—the forerunner to the European Union.

It’s a tragic story, albeit one with a happy ending, and it helps to explain the endless fascination that 1914 holds for Europeans. When I was a schoolboy, we learned, at great length, about the grand forces that gave rise to the war: nationalism, industrialization, and colonialism, culminating in the rise of Germany and Kaiser Wilhelm II’s push for European domination. (This was an English classroom. German schoolchildren learned a somewhat different history.) We read about the great prewar naval race between the United Kingdom and Germany, and the repeated diplomatic crises, in Morocco and the Balkans, that preceded the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, in Sarajevo. We learned about the war’s global impact—how it eventually drew the United States out of its splendid isolation—and its social impact, which included a big boost to gender equality in Britain and other countries. (Once women were manning the military production lines, as they were in factories throughout Europe, it was harder to argue against universal suffrage.)

Most of all, though, we learned about the human horrors of the war, particularly on the Western front, where, for four terrible years, two vast armies engaged in trench warfare, living in awful, muddy, rat-infested conditions, trying to kill each other with machine guns, rifles, artillery, and poison gas. All told, about sixteen million people died in the war, and more than twenty million were wounded. Even today, the names of the generals responsible for this unprecedented carnage are imprinted on my mind—Joffre, Foch, and Nivelle; French and Haig; von Falkenhayn and Ludendorff—and so are the names of some of the bloody battles that they ordered their soldiers to fight: Mons, Marne, Ypres I, Ypres II, Somme, Verdun, the Aisne, Passchendaele.

The first day of the Somme offensive, which Joffre and Haig ordered in the summer of 1916, over the objections of other military experts, including Winston Churchill, was the worst in the British Army’s history, with about fifty-seven thousand casualties. At the Aisne, where the French attacked a German Army entrenched on higher ground, the number of soldiers killed and injured is still disputed. About a quarter of a million may be a reasonable estimate. At Passchendaele, also known as the Third Battle of Ypres, the death toll was more than twice that.

And all for what? At the end of each of these battles, neither side had made much progress. Despite the recent efforts of some black-is-white historians, who have sought to resurrect the reputations of Foch, Haig, et al_,_ the overriding lesson of the Great War that we learned in school was surely the right one: war is hell, and it’s far too terrible to leave it to the generals.

Most of all, though, what I remember about learning about the First World War is the poetry, which evolved from the upbeat sonnets of Rupert Brooke to the dreadful but somehow beautiful realist imagery of Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon, both of whom served in the trenches. In his 1914 poem, "The Soldier," Brooke, a devilishly handsome private schoolboy (at Rugby), who, along with Maynard Keynes and Lytton Strachey, was a member of the Cambridge Apostles, summoned the jingoistic spirit of Kipling and Palmerston. Here is the famous first stanza:

If I should die, think only this of me:

That there’s some corner of a foreign field

That is for ever England. There shall be

In that rich earth a richer dust concealed;

A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware,

Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam,

A body of England’s, breathing English air,

Washed by the rivers, blest by suns of home.

Shortly after the war broke out, Brooke was commissioned in the Royal Navy Reserve. In April, 1915, he was dispatched to take part in the landing at Gallipoli, another disaster in the making. While at sea, he developed a serious infection, and he died in a French hospital ship off Greece, cementing his position as an icon of a lost world. Sassoon, meanwhile, was serving on the Western front. The scion of a wealthy family of merchants, he, too, attended an exclusive private school (Marlborough). In the summer of 1914, motivated by patriotism, he joined the Army. Brave and fearless, he was awarded a medal “for conspicuous gallantry during a raid on the enemy’s trenches.” But the violence and inhumanity that he encountered turned him against the war, and drove him to record some of what he had seen: pain, suffering, rotting corpses, hopelessness, and even suicide:

I knew a simple soldier boy

Who grinned at life in empty joy,

Slept soundly through the lonesome dark,

And whistled early with the lark. In winter trenches, cowed and glum,

With crumps and lice and lack of rum,

He put a bullet through his brain.

No one spoke of him again.

The transition from Brooke’s “The Soldier” to Sassoon’s "Suicide in the Trenches" was stark, indeed. But the most memorable war poet, to my mind, was Wilfred Owen, a middle-class Shropshire lad, whose family fell on hard times and moved to Birkenhead, just across the River Mersey from Liverpool. Partly because his family couldn’t afford college fees, he was largely self-educated. When war broke out, he was teaching English in the Pyrenees, and he didn’t rush home. By 1916, however, he had joined the Manchester Regiment, which was dispatched to France. In early 1917, he was wounded twice, and the second time, after suffering a concussion in a shell blast, he was evacuated to England, where, drawing on his experiences, he started writing poetry. During his recovery, he met Sassoon, who encouraged his writing. One of his poems took as its title the first part of a line from Horace: “Dulce et decorum est, pro patria mori.” (“It is sweet and honorable to die for one’s country.”) But Owen’s message was very different. Here are the final two-thirds of his poem: