“In Our Times: The Great War at 100” ― a keynote Thursday night and three panels Friday - was sponsored by the Mahindra Humanities Center. The cataclysm, veteran and poet Robert Graves wrote, meant “extinction of each happy art and faith.” In 1914, a century of near-peace in Europe suddenly collapsed. It is the 20th century’s Russian novel, with a complicated cast of characters and locations. In all, 100 years later, the war is still a puzzle that has kept generations of historians busy. He died 12 days later ― the first American volunteer to lose his life in World War I. 15, 1915, Edward Mandell Stone ’08, then in the French Foreign Legion, was wounded in action. Harvard lost its first graduate to the conflict, a British army lieutenant, in November 1914. 18), a campaign that by 1917 tipped a largely isolationist America into the conflict. (Sixteen million were dead by 1918.) And Germany began its worst public-relations maneuver of what we now call World War I: unrestricted U-boat warfare against passenger and merchant ships (Feb. 16), where 240,000 casualties a month later hinted at the catastrophic scale the war would come to represent.
France launched its second offensive on the Western Front (Feb.
31), deploying 18,000 shells against Russian troops near Warsaw. The Germans used the first poison gas (Jan. Germany started modern war’s first aerial bombing campaign (Jan. One hundred years ago, in the first two months of 1915, what was then called the Great War - puzzled over by experts gathered at a Harvard conference on Friday ― established its most enduring historical signatures.
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