At the turn of the century, everything in Europe was new. Electricity, automobiles, airplanes, everything. People were flocking into cities where the big factories were, and every major economy was geared towards the production of war materiel, munitions, ships, all that stuff. Everything was building and growing and Europe was prospering.

Another new thing was the idea of a United Germany. All the little German states had only been together since 1871 after a bunch of little wars. The Chancellor and the Kaiser were mostly at odds with one another and no one knew what the future held for Germany.

The Kaiser, Wilhelm II, took care of all that. He got rid of Bismarck, the Chancellor, first of all. He had all the uniforms and medals and parades and got everyone all up in arms about this new Germany he was going to build. Speaking of arms, the thing about Wilhelm was he had this useless, withered left arm which to people today might not seem like such a big thing, but this was GERMANY, DAMMIT!!! You know all that super-nationalist crap that Nietzsche wrote about, the ubermensch and the master race, that didn't come from nowhere; Germany always prized physical perfection, and here was the Kaiser supposed to be the Super-German and he had a BAD ARM. You can imagine what his personality was like. The history books will try to be tactful and say he was mercurial and bombastic, but what they really mean is that he was a pompous ass and a bully with a bad temper. You ever see those pictures of the Kaiser riding around Berlin with his generals in those big, open cars with the spiked helmets and the long overcoats? Those were cavalry uniforms. And THAT'S not pretentious or anything.

Wilhelm's mom was the oldest daughter of Queen Victoria of England. His first cousin was Nicholas II, the Tsar of Russia. Nicholas' wife Alexandra was the niece of the Prince of Wales. Does this not sound like one of those big hillbilly families up in the Ozarks who get in these big feuds that last for generations?

The English had their own troubles, with the Republicans in Northern Ireland and the suffragettes at home. The French had always disliked the British but they really hated the Germans, having lost the territories of Alsace-Lorraine to them in the Franco-Prussian War in the 1870s. Austria-Hungary was never the most stable place in the world; the two countries, Austria and Hungary, had one Emperor but they each had their own parliament (yeah, THAT'S a good idea), and all kinds of little ethnic groups running around causing their own trouble, especially the Serbs in the Southwest corner. But nobody had troubles like Russia.

Did you ever have a friend who was a really nice guy but there just always seemed to be something a little "off" about him, and you never could quite put your finger on what it was? And then one day you go to his house for supper and the dad is yelling at the mom and the mom is yelling at the kids and the kids are having a food fight and the older sister is walking around in her underwear and the dog is running around in circles in the yard and there's a dead cat in the freezer? That's what Russia was like.

The Romanovs had ruled Russia for like 300 years or something like that, but Nicholas II got it into his head somehow that he ought to be a "man of the people" and got out to meet the peasants and the workers, but instead of endearing himself to them, most of them looked at him and thought "So what's the big deal with him?" Alexandra took up with some wild-eyed drunk named Rasputin, which didn't look real good, you know, kind of like Frank Sinatra sleeping over at the Reagan White House, if Sinatra was completely insane and a monk. The cossacks rode across Russia looting and pillaging and getting rid of "undesirables". Lenin was calling for a bloody revolution, which was a far cry from the pacifist hippy kind of socialism that guys like Jean Juares were preaching in France and Switzerland. There were all kinds of political groups and all were calling for reform and everybody's idea of reform seemed to begin with the Tsar dying.

And if Russia was the wild dysfunctional family, then Serbia was the crazy little brother. Not the kind of little brother you could push around, though. Well, you could push him around, but like every single time you did it he would jump on your back and try to take a bite out of you, or he wouldn't do anything and you think you got away with it and then three days later when you sit down for supper he stabs you in the head with a fork. Russia had always looked out for the Serbs, too, which is probably why Serbia even existed at all and hadn't been eaten up by Austria-Hungary.

Bismarck had once said that some little thing in the Balkans would someday ignite a major war, which may sound psychic or something but really when he said it, it had almost happened twice already so he wasn't going out on a limb or anything, but that's exactly what happened. Some radical in Serbia named Princip, who couldn't even get into the army in a little country like that, went into Sarajevo and shot the Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria-Hungary. I'm certain that people have these spy-thrillers in mind, like "Day of The Jackal" or something, but I've seen pictures of him and Princip looks more like Barney Fife trying to impress the folks back in Mayberry.

Now everything was fixing to blow up and you would think at this point that if only the leaders of these countries had sat down and talked to one another, the whole thing could have been avoided. But they were talking already, in fact, most of them were kin to one another. They were that big old redneck family headed up by Grandma Vicky in England. Nicholas, in Russia, used to tour the trenches and receive telegrams from Germany behind the lines signed "Cousin Willy", and I swear I am not making that up.

And so Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia. Russia declared war on Austria-Hungary. Germany declared war on Russia. France declared war on Germany. Germany marched through Belgium to invade France and Britain declared war on Germany.

The war went on and on and on and on and on. For me I think the worst part of war would be knowing you can't win and having to keep on fighting anyway. I think Germany realized fairly early-on that they couldn't win. Now, Americans like to think that we are the center of the universe and that we won the war for them, but the truth is that the American contribution to the actual war effort was minimal. I mean, we came in fairly late in the war. But it did put a lot of pressure on the Germans to make peace, and Wilson did a lot for the peace process.

In the end, Austria-Hungary was broken up into a lot of little pieces. Did you ever see The Sound of Music and wonder how come Captain Von Trapp kept making a big deal out of being an Austrian and a naval hero, when Austria doesn't even have a coastline? Its because before the war the Empire was huge. France got back Alsace-Lorraine from the Germans but aside from that Germany remained mostly intact. Intact, I mean, as in ground into the dirt.

And then came World War II. But that's another story.