The Spectator at war: ‘The great war has come…’

This is the first in a series of daily extracts from the Spectator during the course of the first world war. The aim is not to tell the full story of the conflict, or even to provide a full assessment of our coverage of it — that requires deeper expertise and a wider view. Our regular archive writer Molly Guinness will continue to provide such a perspective. Instead, we’ll seek to give an impression, week by week and page by page, of the atmosphere of the time, with a minimum of commentary and hindsight. And the logical place to begin is with the first ‘News of the Week’ paragraph from The Spectator for the week ending Saturday, August 8, 1914:

‘The great war has come, and come exactly as all sensible people knew it would come – very suddenly, without apparent reason, or, at any rate, without apparent reason in the least proportionate to the event, and involving the whole of Europe immediately or in the very near future.