Points Summer Book Club

Good morning, and welcome to the Points Summer Book Club. Quick administrative note: our mailbox is on the fritz this morning, so for now, e-mail your questions and comments to me at rdreher@dallasnews.com, until further notice.

I was recently in Istanbul, standing on a watchtower gazing across the harbor, and telling a friend that this piece of land and water was no doubt one of the most fought-over in history. Did you know, I said, that just down the straits, the battle of Gallipoli in World War I, a campaign in which the Allies tried and failed to open a path to the capital of the Ottoman Empire, resulted in 500,000 dead or wounded on both the Turkish and Allied sides?

"Half a million?" my friend said. "That can't be right."

I thought: you know, that's probably true. I must have read that wrong.

So this weekend I checked. Indeed, half a million men either perished or were wounded in that single campaign of World War I.

Half a million.

World War I was the war that killed Europe's soul. We are still living with its effects today, not only strategically (Iraq was a creation of the postwar order), but culturally and spiritually. All Quiet on the Western Front details what it was like in the belly of the beast.