Today, life pretty much continued as usual, and other than a few officials in ceremonies around the country, I doubt many people stopped what they were doing to reflect on that distant conflict and what it meant for the world.
My wife's late aunt, a girl of almost seven when war was declared in August 1914, recalled that people working in the fields dropped their tools - it was right in the middle of harvest season - so immediate was the effect.
Within weeks, thousands would be dead. And the thousands became millions.
Here in Brittany, far from the WW I battlefields of northern France, the war nevertheless was felt, and with devasting results. On the "Monument aux Morts" of my wife's native village, her uncle's name appears. He had been gassed, and died in hospital in Caen in Normandy:
On the same monument, the names of eight village soldiers killed the same day on a faraway battlefield in Belgium, just three weeks after trading their rakes for rifles (photo below). On August 22, 1914, before the glory faded on the bright blue and red French uniforms with the deadly, muddy dreariness of five subsequent winters, France came to the aid of Belgium in the earliest days of the war. There's a Belgian blog with information on the battle of Maissin.
Imagine the impact on a rural farming community such as this Breton village - seven of its sons killed on the same day. In Britain, early pre-conscription recruitment resulted in "Pals Battalions," consisting of relatives, friends and neighbors. As Wikipedia puts it:
The policy of drawing recruits from amongst a local population ensured that, when the pals battalions suffered casualties, individual towns, villages, neighbourhoods, and communities back in Britain were to suffer disproportionate losses.
I hadn't realized what this would mean to a small Breton village until I took in the names and dates on the monument.
The great British military historian John Keegan referred to the "chateau generalship" exhibited during the war, depicted so well in Stanley Kubrick's timeless "Paths to Glory." Today, we watch contemporary wars - never "declared," such a quaint concept - while munching on our evening meals.
If the First World War seems so distant, its effects are very much with us now. Think of the empires dissolved, the countries born of WW I. And the seeds of nationalism sown. You can play counterfactual history to no end with World War One: if it hadn't happened, would the Soviet Union and the Cold War happened? Would Israel have come about without the 1917 Balfour Declaration? Without the humiliating defeat of Germany and the Central Powers, would Hitler have risen to power and unleashed the Holocaust?
There are helpful websites to keep track of the complex history of The Great War: PBS and BBC's World War One are among the best. But like today's tocsin, it's a somber, long four years that we're commemorating. Next time you're outside for a few minutes in a dismal November rain, spare a thought for the soldiers - Tommies, Doughboys, or poilus - in their muddy trenches.
It all started 100 years ago today.