Despite, or perhaps because of, his personal detachment from the fighting-as an American whose country would not be at war until April 1917-"he was perfectly placed to watch the Old World go mad" (Marshall in Moody, p. 95). Eliot arrived in England, where the ravages of war had created food and fuel shortages, and headlines daily announced the names and massive numbers of British war dead.
The root causes of World War I were debatable even decades later. Some have described it as a battle of empires for control of worldwide colonies, others as the explosion of tension between nationalism in these colonies and the struggle of the colonizer to maintain its empire, and still others as a gradually worsening disagreement between aristocratic cousins all over Europe. All these conditions existed, and perhaps in combination they thrust the continent of Europe- and the Western world-into the most terrible bloodbath it had ever known.
In Britain the government of Lloyd George seemed anxious to rouse its own complacent nation and make it reassert itself as the dominant power in Europe. Lloyd George's government appeared almost eager to battle Germany.
