Woodrow Wilson

            
             From 1914 to 1919, the world experienced the first Great War, World War I. The brutality and mass destruction was unlike anything the world had ever seen. We will examine an anonymous account from a French soldier at the Battle of Verdun, which gives us vivid detail of the horror of war. In 1918, the United States, led by Woodrow Wilson, was conveyed into the war. Even after this point, the United States had largely been kept from going to war by President Wilson. France and England's efforts were struggling from the viciousness of the new kind of combat that engulfed the war. It was the threat of inequality of justice in the world that pushed the United States and Wilson to act on behalf of France and England, as well as the rest of the world, to ensure peace and sovereignty for the nations of the world. From this came Wilson's definitive statement "The Fourteen Points". We will also examine an excerpt of Peace and Diplomacy from Arthur Walworth. The future would show that U.S. involvement and Wilson's efforts towards standardizing diplomacy would pave the way for world government as we know it today.
             Reports from the Front: The Battle for Verdun, 1916 shows that the Germans were resolved to accomplish their goals of the war by any means necessary. This account comes from the book, Source Records of the Great War, vol. IV. The Battle of Verdun was one of the bloodiest battles of the war. New warfare tactics such as trench warfare, machine guns, and poison gas made rapid advancement toward a particular goal very difficult in the least. In the account, the soldier states, "the level of ground is raised several meters by mounds of German corpses. Sometimes it happens that the third German wave uses the dead of the second wave as ramparts and shelters." The front lines of the battlefield were sometimes only a few hundred feet from each other. At the time, it was hard for the rest of the world to not be disparaged by such reports.