aily routine that included household
cares, production or service work, the conduct of neighborhood affairs,
the maintenance of normal livelihood activities, the upbringing of the
new generation and perhaps most important of all, adaptation to a
rapidly changing social situation.

The changes that took place in the summer of 1914 involved an almost
complete reversal of purpose and direction. Up to that point Europeans
were devoting a considerable proportion of their time to production and
the maintenance of the normal life routine. At that point they left
their homes, exchanged ordinary clothes for uniforms, laid down the
implements of peace, picked up the weapons of war and prepared, under
very expert leadership and direction, a series of mass movements
designed to disrupt the ordinary life routine of other human beings on
the other side of lines drawn on a map, but having little relation to
customary life activity and even less to geography.

Execution of this purpose involved a mass movement from the home
territory into that occupied by the "enemy". If the enemy resisted he
must be forced to do the will of the invaders. Instead of cooperating in
a joint effort to maintain and improve the general welfare, uniformed,
armed, expertly-led masses began beating up each other, until one side
gave in and cried "enough."

Plans for war had been drawn and redrawn for years, for decades.
Elaborate preparations had been made. Destructive weapons had been
designed and built. Transport had been provided, food stored. Defensive
preparations had also been made in the form of fortifications so placed
as to obstruct or prevent "the enemy" from crossing the "frontier".

When sport-lovers go from home for a day to play a competition in
another city or province, they go, play the game and then go back home
to continue the ordinary life routine. In the case of the project we are
now considering they left home in July, 1914 and returned months or
years later. Many never got back home because they were killed in battle
or died of wounds; many were "missing"; they disappeared.

If casualties in the 1914-18 war had been numbered in dozens, or scores
or even in hundreds, the communities from which they came could have
gone on without them--handicapped perhaps but not seriously disrupted.
But when they were numbered in thousands and tens of thousands it was a
quite different story. Actually, they were numbered in millions.

Mobilized to c