I tried as much as possible to let the people of 1914 speak for themselves. I also tried to juxtapose words written by people from opposing sides on roughly the same day to show how similar reactions were.Regardless of whether one was French or German, male or female, rich or poor, reactions were much the same. Reading a quotation in Dance of the Furies, a reader would often be hard pressed to identify the nationality of the author.Take for example the sections on how Europeans found out about the war. Up until the final days a remarkably small number of people thought that war would result. Reservists went off to vacation without their military papers, generals continued their vacations in soon-to-be enemy countries, and, except in a few cases, the pages of diaries are full of every topic under the sun but war.In an age before 24-hour news networks and the internet, people found out that war had broken out in a wide variety of ways. Fishermen found out from flags flown on shore, farmers from men on horseback playing bugles, and in small towns from the ringing of church bells. In many cases, people asked the men ringing the bells what the commotion was about; when they found out war had been declared, one common response was “against whom?”Reading this section should put to rest any notion that the people of Europe were urging their leaders to fight a war.Such enthusiasm as did exist was limited to young men and those people who thought that even a state of war was preferable to the tension of the anxious final days of July. But even those people most enthusiastic about the war when it began had grown disillusioned within a few weeks. As early as the end of September 1914, it is difficult to find anyone who was enthusiastic about the war, or who could remember how the shooting of an archduke had led them into this tragic situation.Scholars have spilled gallons of ink on the elites of 1914 and on trying to assign blame for the war’s outbreak. Neither of these approaches helps us to understand the fundamental meanings of the war. I hope that Dance of the Furies will generate new questions and reenergize debates about the events of 1914 and their wider meanings.I also hope to move the scholarship on the war away from national models. There is, of course, a value in studying national history; without the work of many fine national scholars I could not have written this book. Nevertheless, it seems to me that the scholarship on this war is not yet international enough. As a result we see the war through too narrow a lens. Only when we try to see this world war through international lenses will we see it in all its complexity.Finally, I am aware that historians cannot separate themselves from the age in which they write. The story of a nation that went to war believing its struggle to be defensive only to find out that the logic was rashly based on evidence that later turned out to be questionable struck me as not limited to 1914.In 2003, the United States found itself in a much more complex environment than it anticipated. Nevertheless, as in 1914 Europe, public criticism largely ceased once the war began and the nation supported or acquiesced in a war far different from the one it had gone to war to fight.Thus I ended the book with a quotation from a letter to the editor of a British newspaper in the final days of peace. The writer warned his readers not to believe the promises of a quick, glorious victory being sold to them by politicians and journalists. Instead, he foresaw that the leaders of Europe were “trifling” with a dangerous game as likely to destroy the winners as the losers.What this reader wrote in 1914 remains true today: “All who participate in war, of course, intend to put the death and destruction (sic) on [their] enemies, but history shows that crushing punishment has often fallen on those who thought they could impose it on others.”