Full list  |  Top US President Woodrow Wilson, 1913: 'The awakening of the people of China to the possibilities under free government is the most significant, if not the most momentous, event of our generation.' General Chiang Kai-shek, 1924: ‘They always scold other people as slaves of America, of England and Japan, never realizing that they themselves have already completely become slaves of Russia.’

CHINA, ASIA. China's monarchs could perhaps take comfort that many European royals lost their footing during the 1910s. Perhaps it was less comforting just how fast they fell. So fragile was Qing leadership in China that a sturdy sneeze would topple them, or so the popular viewpoint mocked. 

In the end the sneeze that broke the Emperor's back was what might have otherwise been an army revolt. After the Chinese Republic was declared on January 1, 1912, he spent his remaining years as a humble mortal, first as a Japanese puppet in Manchuria and then as a gardener under the Communists. 

Manwhile the star quality of the Chiang family travelled internationally; in 1937 the Generalissimo and Madame Chiang Kai-Shek shared the time Person of the Year award.

Full list  |  Top Captain Smith of the Titanic, speaking shortly before the maiden voyage of 1912 : 'I cannot imagine any condition which would cause a ship to founder. I cannot conceive of any vital disaster happening to this vessel. Modern ship building has gone beyond that.' British Prime Minister Herbert Henry Asquith, speaking shortly after the tragedy of 1912 : 'I am afraid we must brace ourselves to confront one of those terrible events in the order of Providence which baffle foresight, which appall the imagination, and which make us feel the inadequacy of words to do justice to what we feel.'

USA, THE AMERICAS. One symptom of frustration with inadequate rulers and unfathomable military alliances was greater use of transport to leave your troubles behind. By the 1910s increasing numbers of discontented and restless peoples settled on better lives and rulers not just in the next town or city but in the next continent. Closely associated with increased migration were two improvements in transport: the speed of ocean-crossing vessels and their safety – or so the hope went before Titanic, whose sinking on a moonlit night in 1912 transformed it into, if not the most famous ship in history, at least the most famous sinking.

Christened informally as 'Titanic the unsinkable' the White Star combined passenger and freight ship was the worlds most technically advanced vessel and, something which would prove fatal, the worlds largest moving object. Turning the beast needed at least 1.5 kilometers and on the cusp of its demise, four days into a seven day passage, it had barely one third the needed distance, no more than half a kilometer, which translated into a little over 30 seconds wiggle time. Turning frantically if fruitlessly to port the starboard side bashed the iceberg and cut the jugular.   

Titanic’s demise was decisively quick. The enormous iceberg was struck at 11:40 pm, after which water immediately seeped simultaneously into several forward compartments, and within one frantic and frenzied hour the matter was sufficiently grave for the first distress calls to go out on the Marconi radio and the first lifeboats to wet their bottoms. The SS Carpethia received the call but at 90 km distance needed four hours to arrive. When it reached the debris field at 4:30 am it was a couple of hours after the final curtain. Meanwhile much nearer to Titanic another ship was sighted. Even though distress rockets were fired the SS California headed into the inky night, seduced as much as anyone with the hibris of an unsinkable ship. Plus, at the enquiry later revealed, at the time the ocean was flat calm with no wind or moon present and stars were out. Tellingly this overlooked that such calm made sighting icebergs using the breaking waves at their waterline more difficult.

Captain Smith with his white Santa-Claus beard was doubtless incredulous at the unfolding speed of the catastrophe. Two-and-a-half hours after striking the iceberg the pride of Belfast, complete with 159 furnaces and four mega funnels, split in two and submerged into the icy ocean complete with Captain – the stern ended up around 600 meters aft of the bow by the time it hit the seabed three kilometres down. Of 2,200 people on board 1,500 drowned –  a kill-ratio of 2-in-3. Shockingly, and this was perhaps one of the biggest repercussions of the sinking, the twenty working lifeboats were not used to capacity. Far from it, in fact, and the first one went to water with only 37 souls on board or at 57% capacity. Even at 100% capacity the lifeboats available could only have saved half the souls on board rather than the one third they did save. Consequences were as dire for rich as for poor – as well as the poor seeking better fortune in better countries the maiden voyage attracted the glittering and wealthy. By one calculation the total assets on the upper decks exceeded half a billion (1912) dollars.

Titanic was far from the only sea tragedy of the 1910s. Sinking ships claiming the lives of over a thousand lives happened often enough at the time and included the General Slocum, which caught fire in American waters in 1904. Shortly after Titanic sank the Japanese SS Kichemaru disappeared in an autumn storm in the Pacific. There too over a thousand lives were lost. In 1914 the Empress of Ireland sank after a collision in fog and killed more than a thousand – and more passengers were killed then than the Titanic which had seen a good number of crew survive. When a Chinese steamer, the Hsin Yu, sank in 1916 over a thousand died, passengers and crew combined. As other disasters went too, not just in shipping but in this decade or indeed through the century, the loss of life was not especially substantial. Far more died in industrial accidents in Britain during a few weeks during all of the 1910s.

So if not the scale of deaths what was so different about Titanic? Perhaps the sharpest focus point on Titanic was how it exposed the central role human psychology in disasters – and even though by the 1910s shipbuilders had almost entirely replaced wood with iron and steel they could not yet manage for human errors of greedy owners and acquiescent captains and lazy radio operators.

The emotional heartaches filtered widely into the arts for decades. Crucially underpinning the emotional impact was that the ship was transporting not government entities like an army or an expedition of well-paid civil servants but instead a collection of individuals many of whom were seeking better lives in the New World. Individual passengers on the Titanic, survivor or fatality, and also crew like the First Officer Murdoch easily came to symbolize an individual search for advantages in the two connected worlds of Southampton and New York – between the Old and the New Worlds. 

Certainly not all fault rested in those on board the Titanic. The SS California was on the same passage to the north and west of Titanic and had warned of ice. So serious was the threat – 1912 was unseasonably warm and many more icebergs had broken off from the Newfoundland pack ice – they had hove to and sat out the night. But despite warnings of ice Titanic steamed into the night. It was not at full speed but very close – around 21.5 knots from the maximum speed of 23 knots so was approaching 95% of maximum speed. On the first day of the passage 621 kilometers passed and this ramped significantly to 835 km on day two and then 878 on day three.  

Captain Smith had heeded some warnings and elected for the southerly route to New York. Several hundred kilometers longer than the northerly one this avoided the worst of the Newfoundland ice flows. Just as well for ice was not a warning to ignore. The one which struck Titanic – and the dark scar on the iceberg was photographed in the following days – was estimated at 80 meters high. Following the rule that 7/8 or around 88% of an iceberg lurks below the surface this made the iceberg six times the size of Titanic. When it did strike a 90 meter sequence of holes cut below the waterline. The bow-to-stern ship measured 269 meters meaning that one third of one side was breached.    

Much changed when the huge iron ship sank and broke up after hitting an iceberg the captain and crew had been warned about. In one of the most famously avoidable maritime disasters, the ship could have circled even further to the south or as one vessel did that night hove to and drifted. Marconi wireless on board was often used for passengers to stay in touch with the shore and through a relay station in Newfoundland.

After the Titanic sinking popular discontent at government neglect of safety at sea galvanised both Britain and America, the two ascendant maritime powers in the Atlantic. Two post-sinking enquiries, one in London and one in New York, reached broadly similar conclusions. The fact that Titanic had been designed to carry forty-two lifeboats and the designer had planned for fifty lifeboats, just to be safe, was noted somberly. Never again would ships be allowed to carry only half the number of lifeboats expected – and never again would safety-at-sea legislation be so relaxed. At the time of the sinking Titanic’s paltry twenty lifeboats was still four more than required by British maritime law of the time.

Some accusations settled on the luckless Captain Smith. Approaching retirement this was one of his last passages. The Captain had also undertaken in the previous summer the maiden voyage of the Olympic (one of two sister ships, the other being the Gigantic).

Full list  |  Top US businessman Henry Ford: 'There is something sacred about big business. Anything which is economically right is morally right.' British politician Ernest Bevin on the city of Detroit, 1926: 'A hard cruel city. No culture. Blasé, gaudy, noisy. No one talks to you except in dollars and mass production and the way they boss the labour. A very undesirable place.'

USA, THE AMERICAS. Transport further improved with motor car production. Well, actually inventing the motor car was already several decades old. The real advance was in the first mass production line. Before the 1910s it was not commercially practical to sell cars to the general population. This was because expensive technicians, really glorified craft workers, produced cars slowly by hand and in their own idiosyncratic way. 

As this was labour-intensive few could afford the final product. This expense explained the continued dominance of horses and other pack animals several decades after the internal combustion engine appeared. Indeed it was one of the ironies of the early 1910s that four-legged transport remained the primary transport engine in industrialized and wealthy Europe as much as the developing world. 

America ended this sluggish manufacturing approach by building long lines inside large factories. There, work broke down to small constituent parts. The craft workers, working bit-by-bit with their sometimes charming but inefficient idiosyncrasies, were no longer needed. Instead, many individuals handled a few simple tasks. Production instantly became quicker and less prone to human error. In fact, the linear approach worked so well it quickly influenced more than just cars. Early applications included what economists started calling white goods, products like fridges and washing machines with white metallic casings, though sadly it was not long before scheming individuals worked out how to also improve production of munitions and other weaponry. 

Right at the end of the century the Top-3 of the worlds largest businesses were car manufacturers: General Motors, selling US$161 billion annually, DaimlerChrysler, selling US$155 billion, and Ford, with sales of US$144 billion. Not far behind were Japan’s car giants of Mitsubishi (US$107 billion sales), Toyota (US$100 billion sales), Nissan (US$51 billion) and Honda (US$49 billion), plus Germany’s Volkswagen (US$76 billion of sales) and Italy’s Fiat (US$51 billion).

Full list  |  Top Article 3 of the Canal Convention between the United States and Panama, 1903: 'The Republic of Panama grants to the United States the rights, power and authority within the zone which the United States would possess and exercise if it were the sovereign of the territory.' US President William Taft, 1910: 'My impression about the Panama Canal is that the great revolution it is going to introduce in the trade of the world is in the trade between the east and the west coast of the United States.'

PANAMA, THE AMERICAS. Another feature of sea transport before the 1910s was the disconnect between the world’s two big oceans. This seemed odd because people had long known Central America could join the two oceans. And in the nineteenth century the Suez Canal had linked the Mediterranean with the Indian Ocean and wider Pacific. This relatively inexpensive engineering project brought two continents into one Eurasian landmass.

But looking east of Suez the two largest oceans of the world, the Atlantic and Pacific, remained stubbornly separate at the start of the 1910s. Well, separate is not strictly true. Nevertheless the only way to navigate between the oceans was either around the treacherous Cape Horn at the tip of South America or heading east into the wind. Steam powered ships made this latter effort physically achievable but it was still an economically questionable passage. 

All this explained why opening the Panama Canal in Oct 10, 1913 changed much. Roosevelt – a fan of speaking softly and carrying a big stick – moved decisively as the opportunity presented itself. Like the Suez Canal before it needed decades to achieve and experienced several false starts. In some measure this was because the engineering thinking dated back to the French Revolution when engineers had mapped their preferred route through the narrow isthmus of Central America. The new canal that finally appeared was different from earlier plans but still meant vessels could transit within days a voyage that previously needed weeks. Overnight the vast Atlantic Ocean and the vast Pacific Ocean became an even bigger ocean system connecting every occupied continent on earth. 

By the way, there is an intriguing postscript to the Panama Canal story. The final detonation of dynamite triggered from the White House in Washington, several thousand kilometres away. It was showboating of course, President Wilson loved drama like that, but it was also an illuminating insight to the global hopes of America. Indeed, where the Suez Canal symbolised British imperialism in the late nineteenth century there was a glaring parallel in how the Panama Canal symbolised American imperialism in the early twentieth century. 

Full list  |  Top South African Prime Minister Jan Smuts, 1913: 'For him everything went according to plan. For me, the defender of law and order, there was the usual trying situation, the odium of carrying out a law which had not strong public support, and finally the discomfiture when the law had to be repealed. For him it was a successful coup.' South African Prime Minister Thabo Mbeki, 2006: 'I am proud to say that, among others, Mahatma Gandhi, the great native son of India and, at the same time a beloved son of South Africa as well, provided the unparalleled leadership and example that inspired the triumphant march to freedom and democracy both in India in 1947, and in South Africa in 1994.'

SOUTH AFRICA, AFRICA. Autumn of 1913 produced a pivotal turning point in the struggles of majorities over minorities, not just across the often unfathomable African continent but also throughout all the continents where European imperialism dominated. The Great March of Indian manual workers, mostly miners, working in South Africa was not huge, only a few thousand joined in and not all historical records focus on it. But it provided illuminating and lasting proof that white minorities, faced with vocal and crafty opponents, were far from impregnable. Impacts rippled not just into South African politics but to imperial planning in London and independence hopes in India, from where, fittingly enough, the energy and soul of the dispute emerged. Not without coincidence did the United Nations make its first striking condemnation of apartheid on this day in 1962.

Kindling for the Great March from Natal into the Transvaal had its deepest roots in the new Union of South African that emerged three years earlier out of the havoc of the Boer War. While disconnected units like the Cape Colony on the west coast and Natal to the east, plus self-governing colonies of Transvaal and the Orange River Colony, joined into one country a medley of separate policies still existed. Although Indians in South Africa held more rights than the black majority the rub was the white minority held more rights than either. A commentator of the time phrased the inequities thus: 'Pigmentation was not merely a physical defect; it was a moral and an economic crime.' Principally niggling for subcontinent people living in South Africa was a £3 annual tax imposed on all Indians indentured after 1895. In practice this affected all Indians over sixteen.

Though other roots pre-dated this enmity. In the autumn of 1906 a fresh-faced lawyer from India called Mohandas Gandhi organized a peaceful campaign (dubbed ‘satyagraha’) against a proposed Asiatic Law, targeting Indian immigrants in Transvaal. Despite unease from London, where Gandhi had travelled to promote the cause, in 1907 the white dominated Botha-Smuts Government still passed the new Transvaal Legislature. Severely reducing Indian rights this incensed Gandhi and others as a slur on all south Asians under British rule and not just those working in Africa. Adding fuel to the fire the Supreme Court at Cape Town ruled marriages not performed according to Christian traditions were invalid. In a stroke this precluded Indian marriages performed according to Hindu or Muslim or Parsi traditions. Clearly wicked even JC Smuts, the South African general, described it in the 1940s as 'a skeleton in our cupboard.'

By the time of the Great March Gandhi had been in and out of South Africa for a couple of decades and involved himself in a growing series of protests. Foundations for his energy dated back to 1893 when, after witnessing the abusive conditions of Indians, he was influential in setting up the Natal Indian Congress. After that had come a petition against plans by the Natal Legislative Assembly to disenfranchise Indians. So successful was the document that 10,000 signatures arose and the resulting agitation wheedled out a compromise from London. Lord Ripon, the Colonial Secretary, formally ruled against the Bill. Showing the fragile British presence, in 1896 the Bill became law though diluted its language, 'merely' denying votes to people not of European origin and the indigenous population who had not previously enjoyed the vote. Frustrated at the cunning, Gandhi divided his time between work as a lawyer and helping set up the Phoenix Settlement of 1904, focusing on simple and agricultural living, though never losing his eye for good protests. In 1909 spent several months in prison in Pretoria.

All these problems hissed away like an unexploded grenade. Now in 1913, with the latest onslaught against Indians, pockets of resistance appeared throughout the African country, from coastal ports like Port Elizabeth to inner cities like Johannesburg and plantations in the Tongaat and Verulam, farms of Umzinto and, crucially, the mines of Newcastle. Gandhi recruited volunteers to defy edicts preventing Indians crossing between the Transvaal and Natal without documents. As authorities arrested leading members in Balfour in the Eastern Transvaal events centred on a group of women crossing the border between Natal and Transvaal. The feat prompted strong reactions. When 2,000 workers stopped work employers retaliated by evicting 5,000 family members from compounds. Nervous authorities imprisoned Gandhi and several others in abysmal conditions – though only briefly. They quietly released Gandhi in December of 1913, in time for Christmas, and most of the others in February 1914.

So successful was the march in attracting press coverage and creating noisy dissent that the Gandhi-Smuts Agreement appeared in 1914. Bringing the Indian campaigns to an end this provided official recognition for Hindu and Muslim marriages. Later this agreement, consisting of a series of letters exchanged by the two antagonists, formed the basis of the Indian Relief Act of 1914. The Relief Act was a compromise. The main body of anti-Indian legislation remained but it did end the poll tax. Additionally authorities allowed Indians in South Africa to bring family members from India. Blacks were not slow to note what Indians had extracted from whites. From here until the end of the century white South Africans struggled to uphold minority rule over the black majority. Apartheid may have formally appeared only three decades later in 1948 but its soul emerged from the times of the Great March.

Implications did not stop locally. As well as African responses it was also telling the distance decision-makers in London preferred during the march. Exhaustion caused by defeating the Boers in 1903 was fresh in minds and meanwhile conflict with Germany loomed. Not unduly unsettling South African elites proved an apt British move. During the Great War large contingents of South Africans rolled behind the British cause. 150,000 whites and 80,000 blacks and 3,000 mostly Asians served in varied South African military units; several thousand mostly white South Africans joined the Royal Flying Corps, predecessor to the Royal Air Force. South African Prime Minister Louis Botha and Defence Minister Jan Smuts, previous combatants against the British, became active and respected members of the Imperial War Cabinet.

Saying Britain had lost all energy at governance over stated matters. Britain was still interested enough to acquire two German colonies, German-West-Africa and German-East-Africa. German East Africa, mostly set up as recently as the 1880s, was 1 million square kilometers, nearly as big as South Africa’s 1.2 million square kilometres. Brought under British control in 1919 it became in the decolonization era parts of Burundi, Rwanda, Tanganyika, and Tanzania. German south-west Africa, a thirty-year old German colony moved into South African domination in 1915, governed as (British) South-West Africa until Namibia appeared in 1990. It was 830,000 square kilometres.

Gandhi would probably not have welcomed the way South Africa unfolded after the peaceful but noteworthy success of 1913. Interracial violence was serious on both sides for many decades, almost continuously in fact until the 1990s, and civil disobedience seemed forgotten. India, however, was another matter. South Africa's ports and harbours, notably Cape Town and Durban, were also important pauses and refuelling-stations on the way to India. Soon, loyalty to Gandhi’s ideal of passive yet impassioned resistance gained more traction. In India by 1931 the British traded political prisoners for suspensions of civil disobedience, in anotehr pact, this time called Gandhi-Irwin. From here to Indian independence was a trifling sixteen years. Even though millions died in intercommunal violence during the 1940s India made his birthday, October 2, a national holiday.

Beyond South Africa and India the spirit and thinking of Gandhian protest that had fine-tuned in 1913 led to a global collection of activists dedicated to undoing injustice through non-violence. As one devoted fan of the cause wrote around the time: 'Gandhi gave me a warning that, if I decided to join the struggle, I must be prepared to face all the consequences. We were arrested on the Transvaal border as prohibited immigrants and were sentenced to six months hard labour. Till the end of the final phase of the struggle in 1914 I had the privilege to go to jail seven times in company with several other comrades.' This was the power Gandhi injected: attracting young and passionate individuals willing to suffer punishments for a grander cause.

Exactly where Gandhi's political philosophy emerged from remains debatable. He always claimed, humble to the core, that ‘truth and nonviolence are as old as the hills.’ Perhaps more influenctial was the trip to England in 1909 when the young lawyer witnessed first-hand the actions of British suffragettes. Probably that was more influential than being thrown from a train at Pietermaritzburg, after refusing to move from the first-class to a third-class coach while holding a valid first-class ticket. Modestly the great man hinted he polished the ideas of passive resistance in handling his marital tension. Whatever the roots, writing reflectively during the 1920s, a decade after the impact of the Great March settled in, Gandhi lauded the power of the technique. 'Satyagraha is a priceless and matchless weapon,' he told his followers. Provided its adherents were averse to neither imprisonment nor deportation, or to poverty and potentially violence, 'those who wield it are strangers to disappointment or defeat.'

Prominent practitioners appeared on almost every continent. They included the Dalai Lama (removal of China from Tibet in Asia) after the 1950s and Martin Luther King in the 1960s (civil rights in America) who concluded ‘If humanity is to progress, Gandhi is inescapable. He lived, thought, and acted, inspired by the vision of humanity evolving toward a world of peace and harmony. We may ignore him at our own risk’. Other disciples of the approach included Lech Walensa and the Solidarity movement of the 1980s (overthrowing communism in Poland, Europe) and, most fittingly in the 1990s and earlier, Nelson Mandela and the struggle to end apartheid in South Africa.

Full list  |  Top British Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey, 1914: 'The lamps are going out all over Europe; we shall not see them lit again in our lifetime.' Bertrand Russell, 1914: 'And all this madness, all this rage, all this flaming death of our civilization and our hopes, has been brought about because a set of official gentlemen, living luxurious lives, mostly stupid, and all without imagination or heart, have chosen that it should occur rather than that any one of them should suffer some infinitesimal rebuff to his country`s pride.'

AUSTRIA-HUNGARY, EUROPE. Alas, positive developments like ship safety and improved production and more canals did not define the 1910s. They did not even come close. This was because the decade of the 1900s provided some menacing answers about the future state of global imperialism. The answer were incomplete yet still fairly indicative and boiled down to this: Britain and other European powers could not afford to impose themselves on others in a direct and paternalistic way. 

Thus it was a safe bet the 1910s would witness further loosening of imperial powers emanating from Europe. But how long might this slackening presence last? Roman, Greek and Ottoman empires of earlier centuries had declined over decades. In Rome’s case the killer blow had delayed for centuries. Would European imperial power also wither so slowly? 

The answer in the second decade of the twentieth century came not from outside but within Europe. As it turned out, rather than approach imperial decline slowly and perhaps a little gracefully the continent would go for broke and fall on its sword. Several swords, in fact, which is where the alliances came tragically into play. 

So intricate were Europe’s political affiliations that it only took the murder of a minor and elderly European royal (June 28, 1914) in the Balkans to project millions of men into the trenches. If it was the plot of a novel an editor would have rejected it as fanciful. But it was real enough. A huge war, indisputably the largest in human history up to that time, engulfed the continent and left every single country pointlessly weakened. Within four years of the Archduke’s death Europe’s imperial capacity and enthusiasm was also dead. 

Full list  |  Top F Scott Fitzgerald, US writer, 1931: 'Though the Jazz Age continued it became less and less an affair of youth. The sequel was like a children’s party taken over by the elders.' Charlie Parker, US musician, 1969: 'Music is your own experience, your own thoughts, your wisdom. If you don’t live it, it won’t come out of your horn. They teach you there’s a boundary line to music. But, man, there’s no boundary line to art.'

As one illuminating symptom of national confidence the new musical form of jazz appeared during 1916 (Oct 27, 1916). Although rooted in African-American communities it quickly spread around first the nation and then the world. Jazz captured a sense of looseness and ambition that neurotic Europe could scarcely match. 

Full list  |  Top US President Woodrow Wilson, 1917: 'America wants to make the world safe for democracy.' British Prime Minister David Lloyd George, 1917: ‘America has at one bound become a world power.’

USA, THE AMERICAS. By the spring of 1917 most of the first division European powers had been fighting each other for three years. Results were not imprssive. Millions were dead and the exchequers of most of the nations were either severely or acutely depleted and for no obvious military or political benefits. Billions in particular from London and Paris had squandered on securing a few insignificant chunks of French mud. The Great War, the war to end wars, the trenches, gas, modern munitions, each were in reality a more or less entirely pointless waste of European wealth and personnel. If war continued beyond into 1918 or even as some were worrying into the 1920s without a decisive end the continent would finally complete the longest suicide in history.

America alone of the industrialised nations had the ability to tip the scales. With a population over 100 millions and spread throughout an industrialised continent it dwarfed Germany's 60 millions squeezed inside Europe. As one insight to the scale and dynamism of American growth a hundred years earlier in 1800 the population was a trifling five million. By 1900 America possessed a population bigger, and ever bigger, than Britain and France combined, each of whom had around 40 millions in the 1910s.

Yet still in 1917 key parts of the colossus remained undecided. This despite the tragedies of Passchendaele and the Somme unfolded and submarines attacked American shipping Washington elected to wait-and-see. And despite the long-held view that American participation was inevitable. Henry Adams, as one example of relatively comon American views, wrote in 1905, over a decade before the American decision to fight against Germany: ‘We have got to support France against Germany, and fortify an Atlantic system beyond attack; for if Germany backs down England or France, she becomes the center of a military world, and we are lost.’

In some measure the niggly and unwavering American distance arose from distaste at the British military in general and Lord Kitchener in particular. The British conduct of the war on such a mass scale looked to many Americans an eery reminder of the American Civil War in the 1860s. Then, American generals with dubious military credentials had used tens of thousands of men as cannon fodder and it looked like Britain and France and Germany were doing similar follies all over again. Lord Kitchener was not especially liked within Britian either. In response to the face on the 'Your Country Needs you' poster one barbed comment doing the rounds was that if not a great solider he was at least a great poster. When Kitchener died in 1917 en route to Russia to plead for an expanded second front against Germany somebody concluded that providence after all was on the side of the British Empire.

With Lord Kitchener gone from the scene and a more pragmatic mood starting to set in among elites in France and Britain the American attitude started to change also. True, President Woodrow Wilson won a second term in 1916 as a peace candidate, which is to say he talked of peace in Europe ideally without American involvement. It was a canny political move in 1916 when the election needed winning. Plenty in America wished to continue isolationism and let the Europeans stew in their own juice.

But by 1917 it was even clearer than before that neither European side could win. Finally optimism for American involvement began to outweigh distant sympathy and pessimism for Europe. In signalling that American troops would head for the trenches President Wilson invoked: 'It is a fearful thing to lead this great peaceful people into war, into the most horrible and disastrous of all wars, civilisation itself seeming to be in the balance. But the right is more precious than peace, and we shall fight for the things which we have always carried on our hearts.' All told around 50,000 Americans died in combat before peace arrived in 1918. It was a similar number to those that died in Vietnam.

British reaction in public was enthusiastic but in private secretly appaled. At the front General Haig wrote in his diary: 'Please God, let there victory before the Americans arrive.' In Westminster Prime Minister Lloyd George wrote that America has at one bound become a world power.

Full list  |  Top British Foreign Secretary Lord Balfour, 1919: 'Zionism, be it right or wrong, good or bad, is rooted in an age-long tradition, in present needs, in future hopes, of far profounder import than the desires and prejudices of the 700,000 Arabs who now inhabit the ancient land.' British Colonial Secretary Winston Churchill, 1922: ‘Phrases have been used such as that Palestine is to become 'as Jewish as England is English'. His Majesty’s Government regard any such expectations as impracticable and have no such aim in view.’

The outcomes of the Balfour Declaration, of course, were less than simple. For essentially most of the remaining years of the twentieth century the Middle East tried to digest the implications. Violence bubbled everywhere and there were at least three wars that threatened to embroil the larger European and American powers to some extent.

Even at the end of the century there was the scantiest acceptance of a two-state solution envisioned by Balfour. 

Full list  |  Top Vladimir Lenin, 1914: ‘There cannot be the slightest doubt that from the standpoint of the working class and the labouring masses of all the nations of Russia the lesser evil would be the defeat of the tsarist monarchy, the most reactionary and barbarous of governments.’ Communist decree, November 1917: 'Private ownership of land shall be abolished for ever. All land shall become the property of the whole people, and pass into the use of those who cultivate it.'

RUSSIA, EUROPE. Shortly after the Balfour Declaration about a Jewish homeland, Russia, the largest European country by geography, decided they were better off without their royal family. Soon after the 'October Revolution' (which confusingly finished on November 7, 1917) brought the Bolsheviks to power came the slaughter of the Romanov family. For someone used to obedience from millions, being shot in the cellar of a humble farmhouse was presumably a bit of a shock for the Tsar. Other European nobility disappeared shortly afterwards though usually in less grisly circumstances. 

Ending monarchy as a system of government might have been a helpful development. However, by the 1910s Europe was adept at turning progress into setbacks. Thus a succession of post-war European rulers, some elected and some not, ingeniously sowed the seeds of a later and even larger conflict. WWII was an especially impressive home goal given that eight million troops had just died in ‘the war to end all war’. 

Full list  |  Top British Colonial Secretary Winston Churchill, 1919: 'The War of the Giants has ended; the war of the pygmies begin.' French Marshal Ferdinand Foch, 1919: 'And next time, remember, the Germans will make no mistake. They will break through into Northern France and will seize the Channel ports as a base of operations against England.'

FRANCE, EUROPE. The folly of the peace on November 11, 1918, and the Versailles Treaty of 1919 that followed, lay in many areas but two blunders were especially ominous. 

The first error went relatively uncommented at the time. Japan had fought the 1914-1918 war on the Allied side and even undertook some military action against German interests in Asia. Technically this made Japan part of the winning team. Yet the winners treatment of Japan during the treaty bordered on condescending. The new Asian colleague received few financial reparations and not every diplomatic protocol came their way either. This was a slight that face conscious and Confucian Japan did not forget easily. A couple of decades later when Hideki Tojo was on trial for war crimes committed by Japan in the 1930s and 1940s his first response was this: 'I would point out that Japan's proposal at the Versailles Peace Conference on the principle of racial equality was rejected by delegates such as those from Britain and the United States.'

A second error, and viewed until the 1930s when Japanese imperialism expanded across Asai as the more perilous, was that European diplomats managed to irritate and humiliate the narrowly defeated German-Austrian axis without neutering their rearmament abilities. Germany was forced to 'return' (the French view) or 'sacrifice' (the German view) the bulk of territories acquired in the France-Prussian war of 1870-1; all of Alsace-Lorraine where over 70% of their iron-ore and related manufacturing capacity existed; and all their colonies in Africa and Asia and elsewhere. As imposed defeats go this was among the most severe in history.

But it was also allowed to keep a small amount of troops - 10,000 - that became a highly focussed kernel for future expansion. A small air force and limited navy existed too.

Perhaps irritating the Germans was an unfortunate need after four years of trench war that had killed millions and nearly exhaused several Exchequers. But overlooking the neutering of German armed forces bordered on the careless. 

In time this double whammy from the 1910s re-ignited both a rising Asian power and a dominant yet defeated European power. It was a mistake that haunted the following decades of European and rippled through world history for the rest of the century. Resentment at authority, it turned out, would continue hissing away like a giant global grenade, the gravest legacy of all.