World War I: European Origins and American Intervention
John Milton Cooper
One day in July 1955 the ground around the town of Messines, Belgium, trembled from an underground shock. It was not an earthquake. It was the explosion of a cache of munitions buried nearly 40 years before. For eleven months, during 1916 and 1917, British troops had dug 21 mineshafts deep under the German lines in that part of Flanders and had filled them with five hundred tons of explosives. Early in the morning of June 7, 1917, the British had detonated the charges, causing a blast that had awakened people as far away as London, 130 miles distant. Only 19 of the loaded mineshafts had blown up, however. The rumbling in 1955 signaled the explosion of one of the two remaining charges. The other lies somewhere in the Flemish earth, still unexploded but practically certain to go off someday.
That incident of the explosives planted deep and their continuing after-effects is emblematic of the impact of World War I both on its own time and on the subsequent history of the 20th century. The war appeared to many contemporaries as a gigantic explosion or earthquake; those were two of the
