Business Insight Zone

When the Armistice came, the guns of August at last fell silent. Relief washed over combatants from all armies, whose lives and countries had been riven by the bloodiest war anyone could remember.

The Great War shattered a general peace that had lasted, with some exceptions, since the fall of Napoleon at Waterloo. When the fighting broke out in 1914, the fragility of that peace was revealed. For a generation of poets, thinkers, politicians, and ordinary people, the world never looked the same again.

The psychological devastation of the war was magnified by the physical methods of the fighting. In that era, defensive technology was, on the whole, better than offensive weapons, and the tactics of military commanders put no great price on the lives of common soldiers. On some of the battlegrounds, tens of thousands of men — French, Germans, Russians, Britons, Americans — perished during the years of the war without actually moving the lines of battle. Those sacrifices were for naught, because the tactics employed could not deliver the strategic goals of the warring nations.

When we look back on our current economic crisis from the perspective of ten years, or twenty, what will will we think of our own methods? What will it be that — like the trench warfare of the Western Front — will make us shake our heads?

Possibly a cooler sense of reflection will improve our thinking and serve as an early remedy for whatever foolishness we discover — an outcome that could provide us with lasting relief in our own day.

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Photo via the HIGHLY recommended Shorpy historical photo blog.

Category: Economics, History