On Wednesday, according to The Associated Press the 90th anniversary of the day Britain declared war on Germany, London is commemorating the event at the Cenotaph, the war memorial originally built for the first anniversary of the 1918 armistice.ДЇour WWI veterans brought wreaths of red poppies to the memorial, honoring those who died. 'It's like you learn not to drive on ice because you had an accident, but you can't avoid an accident the next time you're forced to drive on ice. Violence once unleashed can run into unimaginable extremes, beyond anyone's power to control.' Says Kennedy, 'One recalls (Prussian military theorist Carl von) Clausewitz's famous dictum that war may have its own grammar, but it has no logic. the wars have become much more selective in who they take.'ДЇor all that has changed since the Great War, some historians see themes that are repeated in current conflicts. 'In WWI, the front and the city were two totally different worlds. Televising war, as we do today, has changed its nature, Maier says. 'You can't stop putting money on the table, and the more money you put, the more reluctant you are to fold.' (To put it in perspective, approximately 58,000 Americans died in Vietnam.) Total deaths may have topped 10 million. The number of Americans dead in WWI was 110,000. The French lost a million and a half soldiers, Germany almost 2 million, and Russia an estimated 20 million. Railroads enabled armies to get to the front more quickly than before, and the total number of troops mobilized was 65 million. They had a system of getting every young man to be trained to fight in the army,' says Charles Maier, professor of history at Harvard University.Д¬hemical weapons were used for the first time and new technology wrought more deaths by artillery than any war previous to World War I. 'The major countries that entered into it had mass armies. The four-year conflict that followed was different from all others in sheer volume of both those that fought and the death toll. By August 4, 1914, Germany invaded Belgium, Britain declared war on Germany, and so it began.Д¬lick here for a timeline of World War I. Soon, the nations of the world, bound by predetermined treaties and alliances, were inexorably pulled into the feud, and within weeks, every major nation had thrown down the gauntlet.

The opponents turned for help to their respective allies, who turned to theirs. The spark of that quarrel was Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand's assassination on June 28, 1914, in Sarajevo, at the hand of a Serbian nationalist. What started out as a niggling conflict between Austria-Hungary and the Serbs bewilderingly spiraled out of control.

War to end all wars