I’m reading, well, actually re-reading John Keegan’s book on World War I. (Entitled, simply, “The First World War.”) Keegan is the best military historian over the past 30 years. Probably since World War II. Absolutely readable yet consistently incisive.

I’ve been struck again by the concept of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. I am fascinated by it.

And how the decline and disappearance of it as a political entity reminds me of the death of a newspaper.

The Austro-Hungarian Empire had been around, in some form, for almost 650 years when World War I began. If we consider the Habsburg Dynasty’s earliest possessions to be the antecedents of the empire that went to war in the summer of 1914. And I do.

Yet within four years, this massive, ancient polity was gone. Vanished. A government that in 1914 was considered a world power. That was able to muster an army of something like 2 million men, at war’s outbreak, and to command their devotion to the point that they knew they could be killed in war against Serbia or Russia. Yet off they went on the orders of Emperor Franz Josef, off to this war of mind-numbing enormity. And that’s an amazing concept, considering you could stop 10 people on the street in the U.S., less than a century later, and nine of them would never have heard of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

That’s how quickly we forget. And we seem to forget ever more quickly, in the information era, as random facts crowd into our brains and push out everything else.

What I consider saddest about the death of a newspaper is the idea that it will be forgotten. Like the Austro-Hungarian Empire. And what I find remarkable is that an institution with so much history, that was so big and thriving and alive on Thursday … can be gone on Friday. Pfft. Like that.

Now, the Rocky Mountain News belongs to history. All the reams of information it gathered over 150 years (which is an eternity, in U.S. history) is now in the hands of others. (Aside from whatever hold the Rocky retains on its Web site.) There is no Rocky library being tended.  No Rocky morgue being updated. No Rocky photo file with yellowed prints from 1929 being accessed.

I always have considered newspapers to be historical documents. Not the final word, no. Too much of what goes into newspapers isn’t sufficiently thought out, or reflects a kink in the long road of a story that might be headed off in some other direction.

But, still, it is a form of recording, and it is organic and ongoing, and I think every journalist wants to believe that when he/she leaves a place that 1) he will be talked about for at least a while by the people occupying the office he once worked in and 2) that what he wrote will turn up in someone’s archive search someday as a meaningful record of events, at that same paper, and perhaps even return to the paper in the form of research. And 3) that the paper will survive him.

When a newspaper closes, there is a finality to it that is sobering and powerful. Rather like death. It is almost as if all the work that all those people put into that product — an entire career, in some cases — is now meaningless. Irrelevant.  (Unless the Denver public library has been good about keeping the paper on microfilm, and will continue to make it available.)

Was it Freud who suggested that the worst happenstance in a human’s life was outliving his or her children? Presumably because most of us want to think we left something behind, on the DNA record, and seeing our children go before us … really strikes at that primitive yearning.

And seeing your life’s work disappear overnight … well, that’s pretty rough, too. Because history is hard on those who have left and those who have lost. Not aggressively malevolent but powerfully silent, and forgetful.

John Keegan notes that there is very little in the way of first-hand accounts of the enormous wars in the East during World War I. Austro-Hungaria vs. Russia.  He suggests that illiteracy was a problem on the Russian side, and that the subsequent decades of political upheaval, on the Austro-Hungarian side (which was soon to splinter into about 11 countries, and then be racked again by World War II) distracted the better-educated subjects of the Habsburg Empire.

And, well, the Austro-Hungarians lost, too, and losers disappear.  Like the Rocky, there is no living, breathing successor to wave the flag and speak up.

Maybe that’s all a bizarre train of thought, but that’s how I think. Something so grand,  so imposing, so important, and it’s gone, and all the striving and the energy of so many people … all but lost to history. Wiped away. I find that to be almost tragic.