This weekend my wife and I enjoyed the opportunity of visiting the World War I Museum in Kansas City along with some friends. I was expecting a small affair but was pleasantly surprised to find an excellent and elaborate layout that does a fine job of capturing the enormity of World War I.
At the center of the museum was a wall that held the following stats to demonstrate how huge this war was:
This war was unlike ANYTHING the world ever experienced before this time. People showed up to fight on horses and with swords (because that was the type of warfare they were accustomed to) and they were met with tanks, machine guns, airplanes and chemical weapons.
I have often thought about what it must have been like to live through such shocking trauma. For many, it must have felt like the end of the world. When the survivors returned from the fighting they were met with the Great Flu Epidemic of 1918. After losing 16 million people to death in the war, another estimated 50 million people around the world died of the flu in the immediate years after the war.
It must have looked like the apocalypse if you were alive at the time. The entire world order was collapsing, and death was at every turn. In fact, many preachers and writers were talking about the four horsemen of the apocalypse (death, famine, war and conquest).
This perspective is at the heart of a podcast episode I released some time back called “Apocalypse – A Historical Account Based Upon a True Story.” While I don’t focus exclusively on World War I in this podcast episode it occupies a large part of what is discussed.
We look back at different points in history when people thought the world was coming to an end.
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