Rick Hampson, USA TODAY

H.G. Wells is famous for having predicted air and space travel, the atomic bomb and the tank, satellite television and something like the internet. He is infamous for another claim: World War I would be “the war to end all war."

The British science fiction writer made that prediction in 1914, at the beginning of the war. The four years of carnage that ensued and the subsequent failure to secure a lasting peace – World War II broke out 20 years later – made his catchphrase synonymous with naive optimism and his prophecy as false as time travel.

But on the 100th anniversary of the armistice that ended the war (at 11 a.m. Nov. 11, 1918 – the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month) Wells’ optimism looks prescient after all.

Although World War I was not the war to end all wars, it was the beginning of the end of a certain kind of war. In the past 70 years, war as Wells knew it – between nations – has declined.

To anyone following news from Syria, Yemen, Sudan, Iraq or Afghanistan (where the United States fights its longest war), that might seem preposterous.

But partly because of ideas and institutions inspired by World War I, state-vs.-state, cross-border warfare has faded. Despite civil war and rebellion, terrorism and cyberwarfare, our time is more peaceful than its predecessors.

Will it remain so? President Donald Trump, who went to France to commemorate the armistice’s centennial, has been more critical than any other president since World War II of the security and trade policies that did not end armed conflict but promoted what's known as the Long Peace.

War then and now

Forget what you learned in school. “World War I did start a process that has made the world safer," says Scott Shapiro, a Yale University expert on attempts to outlaw war. Steven Pinker, a Harvard polymath who’s studied global violence, calls the war “a watershed in the transition to a more peaceful world."

The war discredited several assumptions widely held in 1914.

War was romantic and glorious.

There was no romance and little glory on the Western Front, just vast, indiscriminate, constant death. The war decimated the elite classes that had nurtured lofty ideas about wars. The third marquess of Salisbury, Queen’s Victoria’s last prime minister, had 10 grandsons. Five perished at the front.

War invigorated society and "cleansed" it of decadent values and bad habits.

This notion was particularly popular in Britain. Arthur Conan Doyle, who enlisted in the government propaganda campaign, had Sherlock Holmes tell Dr. Watson that the war “will be cold and bitter … and a good many of us may wither before its blast. But it’s God’s own wind none the less, and a cleaner, better, stronger land will lie in the sunshine when the storm has cleared.’’

Instead, the war left even its European victors, Britain and France, weaker and more divided. It soured its strongest survivor, the United States, on a level of international engagement that might have kept the peace.

War solved conflicts between nations.

To the contrary, the war led to the overthrow of half its combatants' governments – Czarist Russia, Imperial Germany and the Ottoman Turkish and Austro-Hungarian empires. It worsened enmity between France and Germany.

A war in two acts

If the idea that World War I lived up to Wells’ audacious promise still seems bizarre, look at the two world wars as many historians do – part of a single conflict.

After this long war ended in 1945, its traumas were not forgotten. The victors established institutions (such as the United Nations), treaties (NATO) and aid programs (the Marshall Plan) based on ideas that dated to the end of World War I.

Thanks to these initiatives, and the fear of nuclear weapons, since 1945, there has been no major war between major powers; even the biggest conflicts, such as Korea and Vietnam, have been limited in scope; the amount of sovereign territory that has changed hands – once war’s raison d’etre – has been small.

Exceptions prove the rule. From 1980 to 1988, Iran and Iraq fought an old-school war, complete with trenches. In 2014, Russia seized the Crimean Peninsula from Ukraine. Neither war set a happy precedent. Iraq-Iran was a bloody draw, and Russia suffered from economic sanctions.

The world still has plenty of armed conflict. But war, says Rachel Kleinfeld of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, “has metamorphosed into something else" – more typically within nations than between them. In 1958, the number of internal conflicts – usually civil wars – passed the number of external ones for the first time since World War I.

Some of the world’s most dangerous places aren’t even at war, Kleinfeld notes. In 2015, for instance, there were more violent deaths in Brazil than Syria.

News vs. numbers

Why does an end to war, or even a more peaceful world, strike people as ludicrous?

Pinker says it’s because we follow the news instead of counting the numbers.

The decline in international warfare is quantifiable. In 2016, there were 49 active conflicts in the world that caused 25 or more battle-related deaths. Only two – border clashes between India and Pakistan and Ethiopia and Eritrea – were between sovereign states.

Public opinion is formed by news reports that focus on the unusual and the violent; if it bleeds, it leads.

Hence, an irony: In World War I, censorship of casualty figures made those on the home front think the world was less violent than it was; today, free movement of news makes us think the world is more violent than it is.

The pacifist who cried 'War!'

In 1914, H.G. Wells, author of "The War of the Worlds" and "The Time Machine," was a prominent internationalist and peace advocate. But he'd become convinced that the key to peace was war against militaristic, imperialistic Germany.

“This, the greatest of all wars, is not just another war," Wells argued. “It is the last war."

“This is now a war for peace," he wrote in "The War that Will End War." “It aims straight at disarmament. It aims at a settlement that shall stop this sort of thing forever. Every soldier who fights against Germany now is a crusader against war."

Like most, he expected decisive battles and a short war. Instead, the armies got bogged down in a network of trenches that stretched from Switzerland to the North Sea. Repeated frontal charges produced minuscule advances and staggering casualties.

The slaughter made Wells’ promise even more important – for only the highest of causes could justify such suffering.

The United States entered the war in 1917, largely because of German submarine attacks on neutral shipping. President Woodrow Wilson, who’d pledged to keep the nation at peace, took a cue from Wells: The war would “make the world safe for democracy."

It ended in 1918 with a de facto surrender by Germany and its exhausted allies. During the war, British Prime Minister David Lloyd George privately mocked Wells, reputedly saying, "This war, like the next war, is a war to end war." But on Nov. 11, he rose in Parliament and said, “This, the greatest of all wars, is not just another war. It is the last war."

The Allied powers gathered in France to draw up a peace treaty. The victors, especially the French, demanded terms that seemed outrageously harsh to Germans. Adolf Hitler would use that resentment to seize power in the 1930s.

In the USA, the idealism of 1917 was replaced by disillusionment with European politics and fear of entangling alliances. The U.S. Senate rejected membership in the newly formed League of Nations, the world body fiercely promoted by Wells.

The peace treaty was signed in the Hall of Mirrors at the Palace of Versailles. Some called it “the peace to end peace."

There were attempts to redeem the Great War. In 1926, the major naval powers agreed to reduce the number of warships. Two years later, most nations signed the Kellogg-Briand Pact, which outlawed war to settle international disputes.

But war was not through with the world. In 1935, Italy invaded and conquered Ethiopia. In 1937, Japan invaded China. In 1939, Germany touched off another world war when it capped years of aggression by invading Poland.

People in 1918 thought nothing could be worse than a war that killed 9 million combatants. This one would kill 15 million. Wells’ dream was as dead as the 20,000 Britons lost on the first morning of the Battle of the Somme.

A day to remember

In 1954, the 11th of November, known for 35 years as Armistice Day, was renamed Veterans Day in the USA. It was part of the slow process of forgetting the war to end all war.

But the day was never forgotten by Franklin Roosevelt, who in 1918 was assistant secretary of the Navy; nor by Harry Truman, an artillery officer in France; nor by George Marshall, a staff officer for the U.S. commanding general, John Pershing; nor by Dean Acheson, a naval officer.

In the 1940s, these men clutched the lessons of World War I as they created the institutions and forged the alliances that helped produce the Long Peace. They never spoke of anything so grand as the end of war.

Wells lived to see the start of World War II. This time, he issued a small book called "The Rights of Man; Or What Are We Fighting For?" in which he argued for a declaration of human rights as a key war aim.

In 1948, two years after his death, the United Nations adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Wells would have been pleased. He’d suggested his own epitaph: “I told you so. You damned fools."