THE `WAR TO END ALL WARS' THAT LEFT NO ONE UNSCATHED.

Byline: Ron Miller Knight-Ridder Tribune News Wire

Today we think of it as World War I - the first war big enough to affect the entire world. But at the time, many who gave their lives fighting in it were sure it was ``the war to end all wars.''

Monday is the 88th anniversary of the end of that war, a holiday that used to be called Armistice Day. Why reflect on a war that few living people can remember? Why call it, for that matter, ``The Great War,'' when the world war that followed was far more global, much more devastating and ended with the terrifying dawn of the atomic age?

All the answers are in ``The Great War,'' the eight-part documentary series that starts tonight and takes up the better part of a week on most PBS stations, and they're explained simply and forcefully.

When the war began in 1914, the world was still a place where kings, queens and emperors ruled, where battles were fought on battlefields, where officers rode horses and carried swords, where the bright, blue skies and the ocean deeps were not yet battlegrounds, where mental disorder was not a common kind of combat casualty.

When it ended in 1918, four European monarchies had fallen, Russia had shaken the world with its communist revolution and the United States had become a genuine world power. War had left the battlefields and come to civilian populations in ways undreamed of in the 19th century - through aerial bombardments by giant airships, through massive artillery barrages from great distances and by the spread of deadly poison gases.

As the age of mechanized warfare arrived, horses gave way to trucks, armored cars, tanks and motorized troop carriers. The skies rained death as fighter planes strafed troops with machine-gun fire and German zeppelins staged night bombing raids over sleeping cities. (``Strafe'' was a new word for a new concept: It's German for ``punish.'') German U-boats patrolled the ocean depths, firing explosive torpedoes to sink shipping of all kinds.

Such technology made butchery possible on a grander scale than ever before: 9 million people dead in less than five years - a million in one battle alone - and millions more left to live with injuries so crippling that modern medicine required quantum leaps to begin to cope with them. Never before had so many soldiers come home with shattered minds - the result of a new phenomenon known as ``shell shock.''

So devastating was the impact of this dramatic leap into modern warfare that many scholars now believe it stunned a whole generation. Those who weren't there to experience it firsthand were able to see it anyway - through motion picture films. It was the first war to be documented thoroughly on film, its nightmare images spread throughout the world.

Nobody who lived through it was unaffected. It created millions of optimists who believed humankind had learned a lesson from such carnage and would do anything to avoid war in the future. It created even more pessimists, who knew no real scores had been settled by the Great War and feared that even more bitterness had been created.

One man who experienced the horrors of that war - a victim of poison gas and temporarily blinded - was a German corporal named Adolf Hitler, who spent his recuperation vowing to help Germany rise from the ashes in vengeance. He would be the man to start World War II.

Another man who was there - he fired one of the last shots of the war - was American ``doughboy'' Harry S. Truman, an artilleryman. He, too, would enter politics, eventually becoming the man who ended World War II.

``The Great War'' ties all this together. It employs some amazing film footage never seen before, and its creators had access to historical records only now being released from archives in Russia and elsewhere. It's fascinating.

Jay Winter, the American-born Cambridge historian who wrote the series and its inevitable companion book, has taken the only responsible approach to such a project, making sure the war is viewed from a global, rather than a national, perspective. (American troops entered the war late and fought in only one major battle.)

``It's about a catastrophe that was worldwide,'' Winter explains. ``I think one of the important developments of this series is the balance.''

Though the series makes it clear that Germany's militarist ruler, Kaiser Wilhelm II, bore the greatest responsibility for the events that triggered the war, Winter's painstaking research reveals other forces at work.

It was a time of great unrest in Europe. Organized labor was growing stronger. Women demanded the vote. Monarchical excess led to widespread public dissatisfaction. Overconfident soldiers believed the new technology would permit them to wage war quickly and cleanly, seizing territory almost without bloodshed.

Instead, the nations that went to war opened Pandora's Box, using weapons of such mass destruction that even they were startled by the results. The decision to wage war in 1914 gave world leaders the opportunity to normalize brutality, Winter believes, and it is a decision from which the world has never recovered.

``A door was opened,'' he says. ``Sarajevo (today) is just one example of the normalization of brutality. This didn't come out of human nature. It came out of historical experience.''

The series draws parallels between the Muslim Turks' genocidal 1915 campaign against the Christian Armenians and the Nazis' ``final solution'' for the Jews in World War II. Hitler and his disciples, the series tells us, were encouraged by the fact that among the millions who died in the war, the massacre of nearly a million Armenians was barely noticed.

``What happens to massacre on that scale is the normalization not only of brutality, but (also) of hatred,'' says Winter, who believes it was a symptom of ``an embittering of the spirit'' that became a legacy of the war.

Executive producer Blaine Baggett points out the impact of the war on a generation of women. In England, for instance, tens of thousands of women took over the jobs of men who had left for the front. Thousands more toiled in munitions factories, where they were nicknamed ``canaries'' because the chemicals they handled turned their skin yellow.

Throughout the series, Winter and Baggett use the words of soldiers, poets and journalists who were there to underscore the impact of war on a culture. The nightmarish drawings, sketches and paintings - by artists who were still trying to exorcise wartime demons a generation later - also reveal the undying legacy of the Great War.

THE FACTS

The show: ``The Great War and the Shaping of the 20th Century.''

When: 9-11 p.m. tonight through Wednesday.

Where: KCET (Channel 28).