seemed to be satisfied with anything less than the total destruction
of the other. Since the war was fought in a confined space in a small
land-mass, Europe, and the mass production methods resulting
from the Industrial Revolution were devoted, for the first time, to
the manufacture of weapons, the loss of life was unprecedented.
The Allied Powers mobilised 42 million men and lost 5 million; the
Central Powers, Bulgaria and Turkey mobilised 23 million and
lost 31/2 million. The wounded numbered an estimated 21 million
and about 10 million civilians died through starvation, civil war or
disease. As the war losses mounted, it became clear that the only
way in which they could be made to seem tolerable was to use the
peace settlement to ensure that a disaster on such a scale would
never recur. The first total war became the first 'war to end all
war', and on both sides the belligerents' war aims, which, when
the war began, were limited to territorial claims and demands for
reparation and restitution, were extended at its end to include the
pledge to establish peace for all time. The formation of an
international agency to prevent future wars was enrolled among
the war policies of all the major states in the conflict. President
Wilson, when he came to Europe in December 1918 to attend the
peace conference, was acclaimed as a Messiah.

The anti-war feelings which launched the League, like the
incorporation of the Covenant into the peace treatie, was at once a
strength and a weakness. It made the League a passionate force for
those who believed in it. If loyalty to the League ever flagged
among its partisans, it was revived by memories of the 'doomed,
conscripted, unvictorious ones who fed the guns'. At the same
time, much of the anti-war sentiment which clung to the League
had more than a tinge of pacifism of an unconditional variety about
it: many of those enrolled in the League cause (and the League was
a cause, in a sense in which its successor, the United Nations,
never became) so hated war that they never wanted to fight an-
other, not even a League war, a war to defend the Covenant. Such
a war they considered to be a contradiction in terms, a commis-
sion of the sin the League was supposed to eliminate. In this way,
League supporters, or some of them, became in the 1930s, perver-
sely enough, the victims of those who used the prevailing dread
ofwar to undermine the international order and the League with it.

But there was another consequence of the First World War for
the evolution of international organisation, namely, that it led the
generation which fought the war to realise, perhaps for the first
time, that there surely must have been some system for managing

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