Author: Charles Gates Dawes

Publisher: Theclassics.Us

Published: 2013-09

Total Pages: 94

ISBN-13: 9781230338651

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1921 edition. Excerpt: ... PREFACE We, of this generation, are too near the Great War to write its history. Time alone can give perspective and then only to the historian and his readers. It alone can assign to past events their relative importance. This generation in the United States is living and has lived amidst such a succession of great events that it has ceased to be greatly impressed by them. Among our people the war is largely forgotten, or remembered because of some personal consequence or some prospective personal consequence. Yet an elemental convulsion of humanity has occurred, so profound in its effects upon life on the earth that it will be studied and described for thousands of years. Of all ages and epochs this is the greatest, and the one to which all those of the future will hark back -- this, in which, though we played our great part, we yet live heedlessly and with little thought of the future. The war itself was conducted on so vast a scale, involved so many nations and armies, covered such an extent of territory, and included such a number of campaigns, that only the trained mind of the future military student will follow it in its details. But out of the study of the war in its larger aspects, already commencing in Europe, there is arising the first of many great generalizations, to wit: the stupendous and unnecessary loss of life and waste of wealth, man power, and material due to the selfish resistance among the Allies to an earlier central control of military and supply operation. When in March, 1918, Foch, who in my judgment will be regarded in history as the greatest of all soldiers, was finally conceded the central control of Allied army movement, it was as a result of a crushing defeat of the British which wiped out their al