Sunday, December 14, 2014

A Gift from Mars


“A fire-eating diplomat in the Austro-Hungarian foreign ministry called the Archduke’s murder ‘a gift from Mars’ – a wonderful excuse to solve all problems.”

- World War One: A Short History, by Norman Stone, page 25.


Superb and, to be quite honest, a haunting turn of phrase found in Stone’s tidy little summation of the Great War.  Since reading All Quiet on the Western Front a few weeks ago I’ve been moderately interested in learning more about this terrible and seemingly all-but-forgotten-except-by-historians-and-history-buffs war.


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