we should trade the usual cant for an historical perspective grounded in the evidence. John Morrow's The Great War: An Imperial History supplies us with just that:
Triumphs and memorials notwithstanding, the Great War imparts a sense of a tragedy of enormous proportions. Europeans, in their hubristic determination to rule the rest of the world, destroyed their own. The class-bound and imperialist governments of the time willingly consigned the men of their countries and empires to unparalleled slaughter, and expended their wealth and knowledge to improve and increase the implements of destruction. Their arrogance and exhortatory, excessive propaganda drove them to become the agents of their own annihilation. Their approaching exhaustion and collapse finally ended the conflict. The Great War originated in imperialism; the victors gained in empire, while the losers not only lost their empires but also their own imperial states. Disillusion and despair gripped all, because any reason, any aim, any goal, any gain, and any commemoration paled before the havoc they had wrought. No peace in the conditions of 1919 could lay to rest the demonic passions that four years of war had evoked. The war had solved no problems before it and left many more in its wake, which gave rise to its even more destructive spawn.
pp. 322-323.
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