The Great Deception; The war to end all wars was started by men, leaders who lied to their people, not seemingly random events.

Byline: Michael Meyer

The central event in "Lord Jim," Joseph Conrad's classic novel of cowardice and courage, is a bump. A freighter steaming across a Pacific Ocean smooth as glass on a moonlit night hits something unseen and utterly unexpected. The lives of those swept up in the ensuing drama abruptly change forever. So they are, on a global scale, in "Europe's Last Summer," by Boston University historian David Fromkin. "To a man or woman in the streets of the Western world" in 1914, he writes, "nothing could have seemed further away than war." Prosperity embraced the Continent and beyond. The world of 1914 seemed blessed by ever-growing trade and supposedly civilizing empires.

Europeans today boast of building a union free of barriers to travel and commerce, but they would do well to look to 1914 as a reminder of what Europe can as yet only aspire to. At the time, writes Fromkin, "the French geographer Andre Siegfried traveled all around the world with no identification other than his business card." John Maynard Keynes remembers it as an era without exchange controls, customs or constraints on capital or exports.

What "bump" did ...