Darkness Falls :: SteynOnline
by Mark Steyn
Steyn on the World
August 3, 2014
One hundred years ago today - at dusk on August 3rd 1914 - Sir Edward Grey, the British Foreign Secretary, made a famous observation that endured across the decades:
The lamps are going out all over Europe. We shall not see them lit again in our lifetime.
Grey died in 1933, a couple of months after Hitler outlawed all German political parties other than his own. But you could have lived a lot longer than Sir Edward, and still recognized the truth of his words - in France until 1945, in Hungary until 1989, and in the Middle East today, where we're still dealing with the unfinished business of the Great War.
Edward Grey was Britain's longest-serving Foreign Secretary, although, in contrast to Hillary Airmiles Clinton, he had a modest appetite for foreigners: For his first eight years in the job, he never set foot abroad, and then only did so because he was obliged to accompany King George V on a State Visit to Paris in 1914. He served a prime minister, Asquith, who, not unlike a certain US president today, had little interest in foreign affairs and was unengaged by distant events in faraway places until late July of 1914 - by which time it was too late, and the great unraveling of world order had begun. Five years later, the German, Russian, Austrian and Turkish empires lay shattered, and in their ruins incubated Communism, Fascism and a hardcore post-Ottoman Islam. And in a more oblique sense the horrors of the trenches caused the Great Powers to lose their civilizational confidence - and across a century they have never recovered it.
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