John Keegan. The First World War.

They were not long stationary. Soon they would be moving, filled with hundreds of thousands of young men making their way, at ten or twenty miles an hour and often with lengthy, unexplained waits, to the detraining points just behind the frontiers. Long prepared, many of the frontier stations were sleepy village halts, where platforms three-quarters of a mile long had not justified the trickle of peacetime comings and goings. Images of those journeys are among the strongest to come down to us from the first two weeks of August 1914: the chalk scrawls on the waggon sides--"Ausflug nach Paris," and "a Berlin"--the eager young faces above the open collars of unworn uniforms, khaki, field-grey, pike-grey, olive-green, dark blue, crowding the windows. The faces glow in the bright sun of the harvest month and there are smiles, uplifted hands, the grimace of unheard shouts, the intangible mood of holiday, release from routine. Departure had everywhere been holidaylike, with wives and sweethearts, hobble-skirted, high-waisted, marching down the road to the terminus arm-in-arm with the men in the outside ranks. The Germans marched to war with flowers in the muzzles of their rifles or stuck between the top buttons of their tunics; the French marched in close-pressed ranks, bowed under the weight of enormous packs, forcing a passage between crowds overspilling the pavements. One photograph of Paris that first week of August catches a sergeant marching backwards before his section as they lean towards him, he like a conductor orchestrating the rhythm of their footfalls on the cobbles, they urgent with the effort of departure and the call to arms. An unseen band seems to be playing "Sambre-et-Meuse" or "le chant du depart." Russian soldiers paraded before their regimental icons for a blessing by the chaplain, Austrians to shouts of loyalty to Franz Joseph, symbol of unity among the dozen nationalities of his creaking empire. In whichever country, mobilization entailed enormous upheaval, the translation of civil society into the nation in arms. (John Keegan. The First World War. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1999, p. 74)

(By my book, John Keegan is the most literate, readable, and engaging of the historians of war, and this is an extraordinarily stunning account of what Europe still calls, justifiably, "the Great War." Compare the brief memorial plaque for the dead of WWII to the lengthy memorials to those who died in WWI in the entry way to many an English church, and you will comprehend the meaning of the word "great." For the counterpart to this joyful scene at the onset of WWI, check out Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War 6.30-31, in which Athens' vessels set out for the disastrous Sicilian expedition. And for another of Keegan's fine books, look up The Face of Battle -- Agincourt, Waterloo, and the Somme -- for the role of military technology on the battle front. For the preface to WWI, see especially Barbara Tuchman's The Proud Tower, about Europe oblivious, on the brink of disaster; and for its aftermath look up Macmillan and Holbrooke's Paris 1919, which is, basically, about why we spent the rest of the 20th century picking up the pieces of WWI. And just for the record, no, I didn't just read O'Brien, Hemingway, and Keegan: I just wanted to note these memorable passages in these extraordinary books, before they slipped through my fingers entirely.)