# Quote — John Keegan, The First World War

> The tragedy of the diplomatic crisis that preceded the outbreak of the fighting in August 1914, which was to swell into the four-year tragedy of the Great War, is that events successively and progressively overwhelmed the capacity of statesmen and diplomats to control and contain them. Honourable and able men though they were, the servants of the chancelleries and foreign officers of the great powers in the July crisis were bound to the wheel of the written note, the encipherment routine, the telegraph schedule. The potentialities of the telephone, which might have cut across the barriers to communication, seem to have eluded their imaginative powers. The potentialities of radio, available but unused, evaded them altogether. In the event, the states of Europe proceeded, as if in a dead march and a dialogue of the deaf, to the destruction of their continent and its civilisation.

- 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: 23
- 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/the-tragedy-of-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)