Adam Hochschild: "The Story of the War Horse"

Well in advance of the 2010 centennial of the beginning of "the war to end all Wars," the First World War is suddenly everywhere in our lives. Stephen Spielberg's War Horse opened on 2,376 movie screens and has collected six Oscar nominations, while the hugely successful play it's based on is still packing in crowds in New York, and a second production is being readied to tour the country. In addition, the must-watch TV soap opera of the last two months, Downtown Abbey, has just concluded its season on an unexpected kiss. In seven episodes, its upstairs-downstairs world of forbidden love and dynastic troubles took American viewers from mid-war, 1916, beyond the Armistice, with the venerable Abbey itself turned into a convalescent hospital for wounded troops. Other dramas about the 1914-1918 war are on the way, among them an HBO-BBC miniseries based on Ford Madox Ford's Parade's End quartet of novels, and a TV adaptation of Sebastian Faulk's novel Birdsong, from an NBC-backed production company. In truth, there's nothing new to this. Filmmakers and novelists have long been fascinated by the way the optimistic, sunlit, pre-1914 Europe of emperors in plumed helmets and hussars on parade so quickly turned into a mass slaughterhouse on an unprecedented scale, and there are good reasons to look at the First World War carefully and closely. After all, it was responsible for the deaths of some nine million soldiers and an even larger number of civilians. It helped ignite the Armenian genocide and the Russian Revolution, left large swaths of Europe in smoldering ruins, and remade the world for the worse in almost every conceivable way, above all, by laying the groundwork for a second and even more deadly, even more global war.