No one expected a renewal of war in the lifetime of the generation that had known its horror and its squalors.
Winston Churchill, The World Crisis: Aftermath
Indy Neidell of The Great War looks at the wars that followed in the wake of World War I. The Allied slogan of The War to End War may be forgiven as the type of puffery that states engaged in huge wars will often resort to in order to mobilize their populations. However, the fact that so many people believed it demonstrated that a strong element of the irrational entered into the West during World War I. Few people looking at the world in 1914 thought that humanity was on the verge of eternal peace, certainly not those at the heads of great powers. By the end of the War many statesmen were actually thinking that a world without war was an attainable goal. Utopianism is always a poor basis for governmental action, and so it turned out after World War I.