The Watchtower has quoted various historians to try to prop up their 1914 teaching. Here are some examples where they quoted from Barbara Tuchman’s “The Proud Tower”.

Watchtower quotes from “The Proud Tower”:

*** w92 5/1 3 1914-The Year That Shocked the World *** “The Great War of 1914-18 lies like a band of scorched earth dividing that time from ours. In wiping out so many lives . . . , in destroying beliefs, changing ideas, and leaving incurable wounds of disillusion, it created a physical as well as psychological gulf between two epochs.”-From The Proud Tower-A Portrait of the World Before the War 1890-1914, by Barbara Tuchman.

*** w92 5/1 5 1914-The Year That Shocked the World *** Indeed, 1914 changed much. It had not produced a better world, and the war did not turn out to be “the war to end all wars,” as many people had hoped. Instead, as historian Barbara Tuchman observes: “Illusions and enthusiasms possible up to 1914 slowly sank beneath a sea of massive disillusionment.”

*** g94 11/8 9 Sarajevo-From 1914 to 1994 *** “The Great War of 1914-18 lies like a band of scorched earth dividing that time from ours. In wiping out so many lives which would have been operative on the years that followed, in destroying beliefs, changing ideas, and leaving incurable wounds of disillusion, it created a physical as well as psychological gulf between two epochs.”-The foreword to The Proud Tower, by Barbara W. Tuchman.

A more complete quote from “The Proud Tower”

The Great War of 1914-18 lies like a band of scorched earth dividing that time from ours. In wiping out so many lives which would have been operative on the years that followed, in destroying beliefs, changing ideas, and leaving incurable wounds of disillusion, it created a physical as well as psychological gulf between two epochs. This book is an attempt to discover the quality of the world from which the Great War came.

It is not the book I intended to write when I began. Preconceptions dropped off one by one as I investigated. The period was not a Golden Age or Belle Epoque except to a thin crust of the privileged class. It was not a time exclusively of confidence, innocence, comfort, stability, security and peace. All these qualities were certainly present. People were more confident of values and standards, more innocent in the sense of retaining more hope of mankind, than they are today, although they were not more peaceful nor, except for the upper few, more comfortable. Our misconception lies in assuming that doubt and fear, ferment, protest, violence and hate were not equally present. We have been misled by the people of the time themselves who, when looking back across the gulf of the War, see that earlier half of their lives misted over by a lovely sunset haze of peace and security. It did not seem so golden when they were in the midst of it. Their memories and their nostalgia have conditioned our view of the pre-war era but I can offer the reader a rule based on adequate research: all statements of how lovely it was in that era made by persons contemporary with it will be found to have been made after 1914. – Forward to “The Proud Tower – A Portrait of the World Before the War: 1890-1914” by Barbara W. Tuchman, page xv, xvi