Long before the horrible casualties began to mount, World War I was huge in the historians’ views even from its very beginning because, for the first time in history, modern scientific weapons and technologies were going to be used to kill men in assembly-line ways. The entire process was going to be made as efficient as the new, scientifically designed and equipped factories: scientific technologies, arranged in efficient sequences and supervised by experts. Now we would see what science could do.

We saw.

Consider just one telling statistic: the British Army lost more casualties—sixty thousand wounded, missing, and killed—in the first six days of the Battle of the Somme than it had lost in all of its recorded history, all over the world, up until that week. France, Russia, Germany, Austria, Italy, the United States, and all of the other countries involved were hit with similar losses, over and over, for four long years.

In the end, nine million combatants were dead, with three times that many permanently scarred. And those were just the combatants. How many civilians? No one really knows. Every country on earth was touched, or we should say wrenched, either directly or indirectly. Over six hundred thousand Canadians (from a population of eight million) enlisted in the armed forces, and out of the four hundred twenty thousand who actually fought in Europe, over sixty-five thousand died.

Commentators writing in newspapers and magazines in the last months leading up to the war discussed in total seriousness the very likely possibility that the new modern weapons would be useless because men would simply refuse to use them on other men. Repeating rifles, modern torpedoes, poison gas, machine guns, airplanes, flame throwers—the horrors they’d cause were unimaginable. No. No one would be willing to use them.

                             Early 20th-century French postcard depicting the year 2000.

Other writers a few years before, more sanguine about how science would affect society, had even been speaking of a coming Golden Age. Science wasn’t just showing us how to build horrible weapons. It was also curing diseases, creating labour-saving machines, improving agriculture, and even inventing new forms of entertainment. Progress was steadily reaching into the lives of even the humblest citizens. Surely, goodness and mercy would follow close behind.

The First World War shattered the optimism of the Golden Age prophets, but it also shattered much more deeply the confidence of the nations of the West, which had begun to believe they had found the answers to life’s riddles. Pre-WWI, people in the West had come to believe that their wise men were in control: the ways of the West, with science in the vanguard, were taking over the world, and thus the sufferings of the past would gradually be reduced until they became only anomalies or dim memories recorded in books.

There had been wars and famines and depressions before, but the traditional ideas of God and of right and wrong, based on the Bible, had retained the loyalties of people in the West because, first, the damage had been minor compared to that caused by WWI, second, the ways of the West had for the most part seemed to work, and third, there hadn’t been a serious alternative set of beliefs to consider.

But now, with the rise of science, all was changing. As we gained physical power, our ideas about how to handle that power began to seem increasingly inadequate. Then, in the horrors of WWI, the moral systems of Western societies seemed not just to fail but to unravel; people’s worst fears came true. Science was a monster and it was on the loose.