With the coming of World War I, the first general European war since early in the industrial age, one begins to glimpse the appearance, for the first time, of the recognizably modern bureaucratic military state: one featuring universal conscription and the deliberate reorientation of domestic productive capacity to the manufacture of war materiel on a vast scale. When the war was over and its cost, measured in masses of slaughtered young men, was weighed against the relatively minor adjustment of the European balance of power that the Versailles Treaty imposed, many Europeans concluded that the mechanized slaughter of modern warfare rendered obsolete all previous ways of measuring the efficacy of individual agency and the glory of battle.