The circumstances of the Archduke Ferdinand's assassination are so strange and unlikely that it is still hard to get one's head around the nature of that spark which would set such a profound set of forces in motion. But then surveying the dynamic forces and their unfolding wreckage, it was probably the case that any sort of spark in a number of places would have done just fine.
With the entangling alliance system holding everyone together in a mutualized threat of destruction for the sake of peace, it would then draw its members swiftly into conflict as they began to jerk and thrash under growing geopolitical pressures, while of course yoked together.
At risk of oversimplifying this mess, Austria-Hungary was ready to declare war on Serbia over the assassination and the implied Serbian threat to their empire, and then Russia backing Serbia and fearing Germany became drawn in, and Germany fearing Russia and being allied with Austria-Hungary became drawn in as well. For all of these powers, time was of the essence, and created a driving pressure of its own as adversaries gamed out the likely behaviors of their enemies over periods of passing time.
Germany especially had a unique geographical dilemma: it was sandwiched between Russia and France. Fearing France would get drawn in as well, Germany decided that instead of waging a two front war, it would make a blitz to the west and smash France as quickly as it could, and then pivot back and take on Russia in turn. The problem with this is that the large democratic armies from the Napoleon era coupled with industrialized arms production and technology would make this impossible. The war intensified and generalized and more and more powers were drawn in until much of the globe was enveloped, and then the rest was history.
Now, the loss of control was total and sustained; it was not just limited locally and temporally to the build-up to the war. Millions of people would be sucked into this thing - like cold air drawn into a raging fire and then catapulted up - and what they would find inside the tempest was unlike anything found in their romantic conceptions.
For all the horrors of war, the modes of violence themselves and the meanings behind those modes do matter. What the industrialized aspect of warfare did was depersonalize much of the killing, removing the human element of the struggle and rendering it almost meaningless. Instead of being bested by a human adversary, for example, or being cut down while gaining ground for one's comrades, people were being literally mowed down by walls of steel and lead pouring forth from the machine gun emplacements, oftentimes for no gain or loss.
This aspect too was initially unforeseen, and officers and generals - running with older conceptions of carefully organized and gentlemanly columns - would send wave after wave of outfits out to be mowed down senselessly and for nothing. The artillery, which had progressed technologically from the cannon to become a fearsome force of destruction that could deliver sustained waves of shelling, would be especially feared and hated. With the understanding of all the horrors that a soldier could face, first hand accounts of the unique terror of an artillery barrage are striking.
Subjectively, it seemed that being shelled was one of the worst traumas on the battlefield: again the violence meted out was completely depersonalized and incomprehensible. One couldn't see it coming; one couldn't anticipate it, and the exploding shells would blow people apart. It is difficult enough to grieve the death of a companion's body that is intact, but the more the physical trauma...
Here it is apparent that the social and technological changes in warfare were changing the modes of violence themselves, which would ultimately affect mass perceptions of the violence and the meaning of that violence. All of these demoralized soldiers would eventually go home and bring their newly transformed perceptions and ideologies back to their societies, lending to the famous post-war "disillusionment" that would be so thoroughly written about.
Not only that, but the mass armies and the industrial supply chains and associated modes of violence would lead to the famous stalemates of trench warfare, those meat grinders that would lead to incomprehensible levels of casualties for little gain, transforming the war into an extended war of attrition, which would require enormous flows of resources, drawing them away from the industrial societies own domestic production, emaciating those societies in turn, and so the desperation would only grow as time went on.
There are many consequences that would flow from this, and we'll get to more of those in time. One famous example is an increasingly desperate Germany sending an exiled Lenin by train back to Russia, in the hopes of fomenting revolution and weakening that power, taking pressure off of that front, a decision - along with surrounding conditions of the war itself - that would help create the Soviet Union and perpetual bogeyman for much of the industrialized world.
We see decisions like these being made after the war too, forming states of affairs that would dictate the shape of the next war and structure the post-war world after that. Take the breaking of Germany for example.
In the greater scheme of things, Germany as a rising industrial power may have been acting in the war in accordance with its interests which any other power would do in its situation, and which was subject to the overriding geopolitical physics of the time, but it was viewed by the victors - especially France - as the pure aggressor and worthy of harsh punishment. That door that gets caught in the wind and strikes you in the back may be innocent given pure human intention, but it is still a "goddamned bastard" when you pick yourself up and dust yourself off and survey the situation.
And so Germany was punished harshly and it would take in that punishment and then mete it back out in the decades to come, becoming a heretofore unimaginable horror in the process.
What we see here is that the powers were locked together in a sustained struggle and pounding the stuffing out of each other, transforming each other in the process and making desperate decisions with consequences that would reverberate for decades - and centuries - to come.
What all of this says about our present state of affairs is only vaguely coming into relief. As there was great transformation during that period of time, there has been just as great a transformation in the period leading up to our present moment. It will take a lot more groundwork to paint a clearer picture, but we're getting there. More soon.
