“It is almost impossible even now to describe what actually happened in Europe on August 4, 1914. ... The first explosion seems to have touched off a chain reaction in which we have been caught ever since and which nobody seems to be able to stop. Nothing which was being done, no matter how stupid, no matter how many people knew and foretold the consequences, could be undone or prevented. Every event had the finality of a last judgment, a judgment that was passed neither by God nor by the devil, but looked rather like the expression of some unredeemably stupid fatality.”