The outbreak of World War I matters here less as a military sequence than as a rupture in what could be imagined: in 1914, the war people had refused to believe would come nevertheless broke out. The book uses that reversal to explain why its impact could exceed even that of World War II.

The Event as an Unthinkable Rupture

The account gives no campaign narrative; it centers instead on the shock of the event’s occurrence. Citing Sigmund Freud’s 1915 essay “Thoughts for the Times on War and Death,” it describes 1914 as the moment when “the war in which we had refused to believe broke out.” The force of the formulation rests on the collision between disbelief and actuality: the war did not merely fulfill an expectation but shattered a refusal to imagine it.

Trauma and Retrospective Understanding

The passage identifies this collision as the reason World War I had a traumatic impact that surpassed even that of World War II. Its emphasis is therefore not on comparing the wars’ military events, but on the distinctive psychological weight of an event that made the unthinkable real. The outbreak becomes legible retrospectively, through the gap between what had seemed impossible and what happened.

Significance

By presenting the war’s beginning through the language of disbelief, the book treats it as a crisis in anticipation as well as a historical event. The remembered phrase gives that crisis a compact form: refusal did not prevent the war; its outbreak exposed the limits of what people had been able to believe.