In truth, there’s nothing new in this|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|The toll fell particularly heavily on the educated classes that supplied the young lieutenants and captains who led their troops out of the trenches and into murderous machine-gun fire|Debs had known prison from his time as a railway union leader, but he spent far longer behind bars — more than two years — for urging American men to resist the draft|In addition, the must-watch TV soap opera of the last two months, “Downton Abbey,” has just concluded its season on an unexpected kiss|They do so by leaving out part of the cast of characters of that moment|Four and a half years later its national debt had increased tenfold, more than 720,000 British soldiers were dead, and hundreds of thousands more seriously wounded, many of them missing arms, legs, eyes, genitals}