When I was a teen, I read historian Barbara Tuchman's book, The Guns of August. It tells the story of how the international community drifted, almost against its will, into the First World War. One incident Tuchman recounted took palce shortly after that war's armed hostilities began and involved a conversation between the German foreign minister and a visitor to his office. How, the visitor wondered, had it all happened? How had the Great War begun? The foreign minister, in obvious exasperation replied, "Och! If we only knew."