# Quote — John Keegan, The First World War

> But then the First World War is a mystery. Its origins are mysterious. So is its course. Why did a prosperous continent, at the height of its success as a source and agent of global wealth and power and at one of the peaks of its intellectual and cultural achievement, choose to risk all it had won for itself and all it offered to the world in the lottery of a vicious and local internecine conflict? Why, when the hope of bringing the conflict to a quick and decisive conclusion was everywhere dashed to the ground within months of its outbreak, did the combatants decide nevertheless to persist in their military effort, to mobilise for total war and eventually to commit the totality of their young manhood to mutual and existentially pointless slaughter?

- Author: [John Keegan](https://www.leafyquotes.com/john-keegan.md)
- Book: [The First World War](https://www.leafyquotes.com/john-keegan/the-first-world-war.md)
- Page: 456
- Source: [Wikiquote](https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/John_Keegan#The_First_World_War_(1998)) ([CC BY-SA 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/))
- Quote page: https://www.leafyquotes.com/john-keegan/the-first-world-war/but-then-the

## More from this book

> All worked excellently, until fighting began.

p. 339 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/john-keegan/the-first-world-war/all-worked-excellently.md)

> The basic and stark fact, nevertheless, was that the conditions of warfare between 1914 and 1918 predisposed towards slaughter and that only an entirely different technology, one not available until a generation later, could have averted such an outcome.
>
> The first day of the battle of the Somme, 1 July 1916, was to be an awful demonstration of that truth.

p. 316 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/john-keegan/the-first-world-war/the-basic-and.md)

> The First World War was a tragic and unnecessary conflict. Unnecessary because the train of events that led to its outbreak might have been broken at any point during the five weeks of crisis that preceded the first clash of arms, had prudence or common goodwill found a voice; tragic because the consequences of the first clash ended the lives of ten million human beings, tortured the emotional lives of millions more, destroyed the benevolent and optimistic culture of the European continent and left, when the guns at last fell silent four years later, a legacy of political rancour and racial hatred so intense that no explanation of the causes of the Second World War can stand without reference to those roots.

p. 3 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/john-keegan/the-first-world-war/the-first-world.md)