On August 25th, 1914, a crucial event in world history occurred. Its importance has been minimalised; indeed, that it even happened has been denied, not merely in Irish national mythology, but everywhere. Yet it became a template for future conflict in the 20th century.
As a deliberate act of terror on that day, German soldiers began to destroy the medieval town of Louvain, killing hundreds of its citizens - part of a German programme of atrocities designed to paralyse the Belgian and French will to resist, in which many thousands of civilians were murdered. A comparable campaign of murder occurred in Poland, most especially in the town of Kalisch.
Far from hushing up these atrocities, the Germans boasted of them. Nor was it simply a matter of military brutes going mad. When Gerhard Hauptmann, one of Germany's leading intellectuals, was challenged to de- nounce these abominations and to align himself with Goethe rather than Attila the Hun, he replied that the Germans would rather be sons of Attila - for which observation he was decorated by the Kaiser. Nor was he alone. Ninety-three leading German intellectuals - including Wilhem R÷ntgen, the discoverer of X-rays, Max Planck, the inventor of quantum theory, and Wilhelm Wundt, the physiologist and psychologist - signed a petition supporting the atrocities.
It was perplexing. Here was the most civilised country in Europe behaving in a deliberately barbaric way, one such as Europe had not seen since the Thirty Years' War, and barely even then. At war's end in 1918, the victors had to deal with a people who, it seemed, had gone mad; and they did so with a condign sense of purpose. Their intention was that it should never happen again.
The received wisdom is that, far from the Treaty of Versailles preventing another war, it actually caused the next one. In this deeply impressive book - which, alas, makes no mention of the atrocities in Poland, a common enough oversight - Margaret MacMillan argues that the received wisdom is wrong, not least because Versailles was never fully imposed.
Certainly, compared with the terms which the Germans had exacted from the defeated Russians at Brest-Litovsk - 55 million Russian citizens, one third of all agricultural land and most Russian industry being confiscated to form a sort of Kaiserene protectorate stretching from the Baltic to the Caucasus - the Versailles stipulations were mild. And by 1932, when all reparations to the victorious allies ceased, Germany had paid rather less than it had extracted from France after the war of 1870-71.
Versailles did not cause the second World War, and you cannot fault the "peacemakers" for wishing to punish wrongdoing. Moreover, as Lloyd George declared: "Somebody has to pay. If Germany could not pay it, it meant the British taxpayer had to pay. Those who ought to pay were those who caused the loss."
And the losses were huge. By 1919, Belgium was a wasteland, with 80 per cent of its population unemployed and starving. "In my poor country, France," said the French minister for the liberated territories, "there are hundreds of villages into which no one has yet been able to return. Please understand: it is a desert, it is desolation, it is death."
Margaret MacMillan has certainly underestimated the effect of the events of 1914 on the minds of the peacemakers. Indeed, she appears to be ignorant of some of them: certainly her bibliography makes no mention of Mark Derez's study of the events at Louvain. "Not all these atrocities were wartime propaganda," she avers. Indeed they were not. Quite the reverse. Most of them actually happened.
But even if she is weak on this period, she is strong on the conference itself, providing enchanting details. She reports the German delegation playing TannhΣuser at full volume in their quarters to conceal their conversation from French eavesdroppers. And the incident in which the poor Belgian foreign minister, trying to increase his country's share of the reparations, declared: "I wish there was something I could do for Belgium."
"The best thing you could do for Belgium is die," murmured Clemenceau acidly, "or resign."
Much of Europe lay in ruins, and so did reason. No sense could be made of the catastrophe that had occurred. Nor was vengeance the only unpleasant emotion unleashed at Versailles; so, too, was imperialist greed, in all its arrogant stupidity. To suit British requirements, the three old Ottoman provinces of Basra, Mosul and Baghdad were parcelled into that uncontainable entity called Iraq, which haunts us yet.
So does that other infamy; the theft of Palestine from its natives by the British and French and its granting to others. The issue here is not of the biblical rights of the Jews, which had been asserted long before the Balfour Doctrine, but of the rights of those in Versailles to dispose of land which was not theirs.
The consequences of Versailles are many, but the second World War was not one of them. Democratic Germany, unrepentant about its crimes, and long before Hitler arrived, had begun to subvert Versailles. A limit of 4,000 officers in its post-war army? Very well: so Germany appointed 40,000 NCOs. No air force? No problem: "air clubs" grew up everywhere. No tanks? Massive caterpillar tractors began to adorn German farms.
Versailles was not the problem; Germany was. Versailles was an attempt at a solution. It failed. Because it failed, the problem returned. A more ruthless peace, ruthlessly imposed, might have prevented that. We shall never know.
Kevin Myers is an Irish Times journalist