http://krieger.jhu.edu/magazine/fw07/r5.html
More than 8 million soldiers and 20 million civilians perished in World War I. Many say "The War to End All Wars" instituted military conflict on the grandest scale ever before seen.
Or did it? "Total war," as David Bell argues in his latest book, actually began more than a century earlier, during the Age of Napoleon.
In The First Total War: Napoleon's Europe and the Birth of Warfare as We Know It (Houghton Mifflin, 2007), Bell recounts the Age of Enlightenment and its impact on the bloody wars that raged through Europe from 1792 to 1815. The fighting during this period, waged on both land and sea (and with muskets and swords), caused nearly 5 million military and civilian deaths and affected every state on the continent. More to his central premise, this era also introduced such concepts as conscription, unconditional surrender, guerrilla warfare, disregard for the rules of combat, and the peculiar notion of war fought for the sake of total peace.
Bell, dean of faculty for the Krieger School and the Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities, sat down with the magazine to talk about his book, writing for a general audience, "Napoleon: The teen years," and how the specter of total war lives with us today.
