Flying across the Pacific, I am reading two new works from the recent explosion of books on the outbreak of the Great War — Paul Ham’s 1914 and Max Hastings’s Catastrophe. I had never seen the editorial of the Economist for 8 August 1914 — four days after the formal declarations of war — which said: ‘It is perhaps the greatest tragedy of human history… In the opinion of many shrewd judges, a social upheaval, a tremendous revolution is the certain consequence.