Though the war initially began as a reaction to treaty violation and involved few countries, due to the nature of alliances (some popularly considered unwise), what could have been, and arguably should have been, a minor conflict soon erupted into the first world war. I find it interesting that for the first few years of war, most countries and (nationalistic) individuals felt they were fighting for a cause, but after a few years most involved in the fight had lost touch with what it originally involved and it became it's own animal. Because this war was not idealogical like the second was, I think it was probably significantly more difficult to keep citizens motivated and sacrificing for the war effort. That, combined with the advent of inhumane, gutless war tactics and technologies, created a greater need for propaganda on a global scale than had ever been seen before. It suddenly became important to constantly convince and reconvince your citizens that the enemy was bad and you were good and they were wrong and you were right because you could not confidently say that your methods were moral or your tactics sound.

I think with this war a major change was seen regarding public opinion of war and what it meant to individuals and society. In most of the history I've read, war is looked at as a rite of passage for men and leaders - an opportunity to 'attain' and prove manhood. In this war, it became the manifestation of the loss of innocence and a blatant theivery of the lives and wellbeing of hundreds of thousands of young people, and for what? Civilians had long forgotten the inital cause of war. Though there were victors and losers, no country truly won because each lost so much in the war. WWI did not follow the almost gentlemanly protocol that previous wars did - war was waged on a new level, involving big guns and trenches and men killing each other without having to look each other in the eye, war was waged in the middle of the night, and new technologies were developed to be bigger, badder, and more torturous than ever before.