The Great War ended the way it began, in a muddle. The central powers were clearly beaten,

but their surrender was not unconditional. Just as the question, why did the war begin,

has no simple answer. The question, what did the victors accomplish, is similarly difficult.

The world had definitely changed, but how had it changed, and what did the changes mean?

The answers were still unclear.

Welcome to the history of the 20th century. Episode 174

Lessons learned, 3, The Great War

The War was over. Lessons learned, three, the Great War.

The war was over.

The peace remained to be negotiated.

Following the armistice and after the UK general election,

representatives of the Allied powers gathered in Paris to hammer out a peace agreement,

one that they hoped would prevent a repeat of the terrible war that just ended.

Next week I'll talk about the peace conference,

and after that we'll take a tour to examine the state of the world

and consider how the Great War affected it.

But before we do any of that, I want to take this week's episode to ruminate on the lessons to be learned from the Great War.

Again, we'll do this in the form of a listicle, just as we did back in episodes 36 and 79.

The top ten lessons to be learned from the experience of the Great War. Number 10. Modern military technology is orders of magnitude more lethal.

You know, this is a topic I've been talking about since the beginning of the podcast.

I've usually formulated it as don't make frontal assaults on entrenched enemies armed with modern weapons.

You'll notice there are four parts to this formula, frontal

...