Nancy Coleman, right, regent of the John Benning Chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution, congratulates Moultrie Observer Managing Editor Kevin Hall after the DAR chapter presented a Community Service Award to the newspaper for its coverage of patriotic events in the community. The award was presented as part of Wednesday's Independence Day celebration on the Courthouse Square.

MOULTRIE, Ga. — World War I changed the world.

The multi-nation conflict changed warfare, technology, economies and medicine, and it spurred the early women’s rights movement, according to speakers at an Independence Day commemoration Wednesday.

The event, sponsored annually by the John Benning Chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution, was held in the Lewis Hill Amphitheatre on the Colquitt County Courthouse Square. This year’s focus was on the First World War because November will mark the 100th anniversary of the end of that conflict.

Called “The War to End All Wars” or The Great War while it was going on, World War I killed 9 million servicemen and 7 million civilians from dozens of countries, according to online resources. The war had been raging three years when the United States entered in 1917.

American servicemen found Europeans engaged in trench warfare — a bloody, stagnant series of skirmishes in which no side could make great gains and keep them.

“Trenches were often filled with mud, blood and bodies,” said Terry Turner, the keynote speaker at Wednesday’s event.

Turner, a Colquitt County native, retired as a professor at the University of Virginia but has also written about his experiences during the Vietnam War under the pen name David Donovan.

Turner described the randomness of death — present in any armed conflict — where an artillery shell or machine gun fire can claim the person in front of you, behind you, beside you … “but not you, not today. Maybe tomorrow.”

“It’s a constant fear,” he said, and it’s a fear that soldiers in the trenches endured for months on end.

He said the soldiers endured because they believed in what America stood for: “They believed their country stood for resistance to oppression,” he said.

In all, 116,000 American servicemen died in the war. Thirty-four of them were from Colquitt County.

Turner read a roll-call of the county’s fallen. As each name was read, Jean Gay of the DAR rang a bell once, and other members of the local chapter planted an American flag in that soldier’s honor.

Afterwards, Sonja Thompson of the DAR led the assembly in The American’s Creed, and Kobe Kenney, who had sung “The Star Spangled Banner” earlier, led them in “God Bless America,” a song Irving Berlin wrote during World War I and revised as World War II loomed 20 years later.

The DAR recognized The Moultrie Observer at the event with a Community Service Award for its coverage of patriotic events.