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Article: 'I Know This Will End Badly'.
- Article from:
- Newsweek International
- Article date:
- March 15, 1999
- Author:
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It began with an assassin's bullet, but by the time World War I was over, it had cost more than 9 million lives. Twice that many were wounded. "Some damned foolish thing in the Balkans," Bismarck had predicted, would start a war. The murder of Archduke Franz Ferdinand on June 28, 1914, ignited a Europe that had been seething with arms races and burgeoning nationalism. The ensuing four years were unimaginably bloody, with battles fought on the western and eastern fronts, in the Middle East, Africa, at sea and--for the first time--in the air. In 1917 Woodrow Wilson sent American "doughboys" to France to join the fight "over there." The Armistice came on Nov. 11, 1918.
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