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A hundred years after the end of the “war to end all wars,” USC experts discuss its surprising impact and how it affects us even today

One hundred years ago Sunday, the Allies and Germany agreed to an armistice ending World War I. The Great War claimed 40 million lives — but also serves as an unexpected pivot point for modern civilization.

“World War I is an amazingly important and underappreciated moment in history,” said Nicholas J. Cull , historian in the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism.

“The war ended when people were able to articulate a vision of the future, an optimism about how things were going to be better with nations working together.”

The war also rewrote the world map. Russia quit the war as domestic unrest triggered the Bolshevik revolution, rise of Communism and the Cold War. The Middle East changed with the defeat of Turkey and Britain’s pledge for a Jewish state in Palestine. The Western powers, fatigued by war, yielded to isolationism and appeasement as the Third Reich emerged, triggering World War II and the Holocaust.

Impact of World War I on medical care

Another thing forever changed by the war: medicine.

“Prior to WWI, most of the medicine practiced around the world was fairly archaic,” said Carl Chudnofsky , chair and professor of clinical emergency medicine at the Keck School of Medicine of USC.

The best physicians and researchers were in the military … so that led to great discoveries that made a huge difference for public health. Carl Chudnofsky

“But WWI was a time when the best physicians and researchers were in the military, not in civilian life, caring for patients, so that led to great discoveries that made a huge difference for public health.”

Chudnofsky points out that disease awareness and prevention leaped forward during WWI, first to heal soldiers and later for civilians. Medical advances included screening for tuberculosis, treatment for tetanus, vaccines for typhoid, prevention of venereal disease and disinfection for surgery.

Triage for medical attention emerged from the trenches of WWI to become a fixture in battlefields and other disasters. And mobile field hospitals and medical trains were innovations that helped evacuate casualties and save thousands of lives — techniques now common on battlefields.

Impact of World War I, the ‘war to end all wars’

And although World War I was called the “war to end all wars,” the U.S. has been at war somewhere around the world almost ever since. Michael Messner , professor of sociology at theUSC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences, said that’s because war and militarism are ingrained in American DNA.

“It’s part of our national identity, the old ideas of expansionism, white man’s burden and Manifest Destiny in the previous century,” he said. “We idealize war and military.”

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World War I

By: History.com Editors

Updated: May 10, 2024 | Original: October 29, 2009

World War I, also known as the Great War, started in 1914 after the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria. His murder catapulted into a war across Europe that lasted until 1918. During the four-year conflict, Germany, Austria-Hungary, Bulgaria and the Ottoman Empire (the Central Powers) fought against Great Britain, France, Russia, Italy, Romania, Canada, Japan and the United States (the Allied Powers). Thanks to new military technologies and the horrors of trench warfare, World War I saw unprecedented levels of carnage and destruction. By the time the war was over and the Allied Powers had won, more than 16 million people—soldiers and civilians alike—were dead.

Archduke Franz Ferdinand

Tensions had been brewing throughout Europe—especially in the troubled Balkan region of southeast Europe—for years before World War I actually broke out.

A number of alliances involving European powers, the Ottoman Empire , Russia and other parties had existed for years, but political instability in the Balkans (particularly Bosnia, Serbia and Herzegovina) threatened to destroy these agreements.

The spark that ignited World War I was struck in Sarajevo, Bosnia, where Archduke Franz Ferdinand —heir to the Austro-Hungarian Empire—was shot to death along with his wife, Sophie, by the Serbian nationalist Gavrilo Princip on June 28, 1914. Princip and other nationalists were struggling to end Austro-Hungarian rule over Bosnia and Herzegovina.

The Great War

Watch The Great War . Available to stream now.

The assassination of Franz Ferdinand set off a rapidly escalating chain of events: Austria-Hungary , like many countries around the world, blamed the Serbian government for the attack and hoped to use the incident as justification for settling the question of Serbian nationalism once and for all.

Kaiser Wilhelm II

Because mighty Russia supported Serbia, Austria-Hungary waited to declare war until its leaders received assurance from German leader Kaiser Wilhelm II that Germany would support their cause. Austro-Hungarian leaders feared that a Russian intervention would involve Russia’s ally, France, and possibly Great Britain as well.

On July 5, Kaiser Wilhelm secretly pledged his support, giving Austria-Hungary a so-called carte blanche, or “blank check” assurance of Germany’s backing in the case of war. The Dual Monarchy of Austria-Hungary then sent an ultimatum to Serbia, with such harsh terms as to make it almost impossible to accept.

World War I Begins

Convinced that Austria-Hungary was readying for war, the Serbian government ordered the Serbian army to mobilize and appealed to Russia for assistance. On July 28, Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia, and the tenuous peace between Europe’s great powers quickly collapsed.

Within a week, Russia, Belgium, France, Great Britain and Serbia had lined up against Austria-Hungary and Germany, and World War I had begun.

The Western Front

According to an aggressive military strategy known as the Schlieffen Plan (named for its mastermind, German Field Marshal Alfred von Schlieffen ), Germany began fighting World War I on two fronts, invading France through neutral Belgium in the west and confronting Russia in the east.

On August 4, 1914, German troops crossed the border into Belgium. In the first battle of World War I, the Germans assaulted the heavily fortified city of Liege , using the most powerful weapons in their arsenal—enormous siege cannons—to capture the city by August 15. The Germans left death and destruction in their wake as they advanced through Belgium toward France, shooting civilians and executing a Belgian priest they had accused of inciting civilian resistance. 

First Battle of the Marne

In the First Battle of the Marne , fought from September 6-9, 1914, French and British forces confronted the invading German army, which had by then penetrated deep into northeastern France, within 30 miles of Paris. The Allied troops checked the German advance and mounted a successful counterattack, driving the Germans back to the north of the Aisne River.

The defeat meant the end of German plans for a quick victory in France. Both sides dug into trenches , and the Western Front was the setting for a hellish war of attrition that would last more than three years.

Particularly long and costly battles in this campaign were fought at Verdun (February-December 1916) and the Battle of the Somme (July-November 1916). German and French troops suffered close to a million casualties in the Battle of Verdun alone.

HISTORY Vault: World War I Documentaries

Stream World War I videos commercial-free in HISTORY Vault.

World War I Books and Art

The bloodshed on the battlefields of the Western Front, and the difficulties its soldiers had for years after the fighting had ended, inspired such works of art as “ All Quiet on the Western Front ” by Erich Maria Remarque and “ In Flanders Fields ” by Canadian doctor Lieutenant-Colonel John McCrae . In the latter poem, McCrae writes from the perspective of the fallen soldiers:

Published in 1915, the poem inspired the use of the poppy as a symbol of remembrance.

Visual artists like Otto Dix of Germany and British painters Wyndham Lewis, Paul Nash and David Bomberg used their firsthand experience as soldiers in World War I to create their art, capturing the anguish of trench warfare and exploring the themes of technology, violence and landscapes decimated by war.

The Eastern Front

On the Eastern Front of World War I, Russian forces invaded the German-held regions of East Prussia and Poland but were stopped short by German and Austrian forces at the Battle of Tannenberg in late August 1914.

Despite that victory, Russia’s assault forced Germany to move two corps from the Western Front to the Eastern, contributing to the German loss in the Battle of the Marne.

Combined with the fierce Allied resistance in France, the ability of Russia’s huge war machine to mobilize relatively quickly in the east ensured a longer, more grueling conflict instead of the quick victory Germany had hoped to win under the Schlieffen Plan .

Russian Revolution

From 1914 to 1916, Russia’s army mounted several offensives on World War I’s Eastern Front but was unable to break through German lines.

Defeat on the battlefield, combined with economic instability and the scarcity of food and other essentials, led to mounting discontent among the bulk of Russia’s population, especially the poverty-stricken workers and peasants. This increased hostility was directed toward the imperial regime of Czar Nicholas II and his unpopular German-born wife, Alexandra.

Russia’s simmering instability exploded in the Russian Revolution of 1917, spearheaded by Vladimir Lenin and the Bolsheviks , which ended czarist rule and brought a halt to Russian participation in World War I.

Russia reached an armistice with the Central Powers in early December 1917, freeing German troops to face the remaining Allies on the Western Front.

America Enters World War I

At the outbreak of fighting in 1914, the United States remained on the sidelines of World War I, adopting the policy of neutrality favored by President Woodrow Wilson while continuing to engage in commerce and shipping with European countries on both sides of the conflict.

Neutrality, however, it was increasingly difficult to maintain in the face of Germany’s unchecked submarine aggression against neutral ships, including those carrying passengers. In 1915, Germany declared the waters surrounding the British Isles to be a war zone, and German U-boats sunk several commercial and passenger vessels, including some U.S. ships.

Widespread protest over the sinking by U-boat of the British ocean liner Lusitania —traveling from New York to Liverpool, England with hundreds of American passengers onboard—in May 1915 helped turn the tide of American public opinion against Germany. In February 1917, Congress passed a $250 million arms appropriations bill intended to make the United States ready for war.

Germany sunk four more U.S. merchant ships the following month, and on April 2 Woodrow Wilson appeared before Congress and called for a declaration of war against Germany.

Gallipoli Campaign

With World War I having effectively settled into a stalemate in Europe, the Allies attempted to score a victory against the Ottoman Empire, which entered the conflict on the side of the Central Powers in late 1914.

After a failed attack on the Dardanelles (the strait linking the Sea of Marmara with the Aegean Sea), Allied forces led by Britain launched a large-scale land invasion of the Gallipoli Peninsula in April 1915. The invasion also proved a dismal failure, and in January 1916 Allied forces staged a full retreat from the shores of the peninsula after suffering 250,000 casualties.

Did you know? The young Winston Churchill, then first lord of the British Admiralty, resigned his command after the failed Gallipoli campaign in 1916, accepting a commission with an infantry battalion in France.

British-led forces also combated the Ottoman Turks in Egypt and Mesopotamia , while in northern Italy, Austrian and Italian troops faced off in a series of 12 battles along the Isonzo River, located at the border between the two nations.

Battle of the Isonzo

The First Battle of the Isonzo took place in the late spring of 1915, soon after Italy’s entrance into the war on the Allied side. In the Twelfth Battle of the Isonzo, also known as the Battle of Caporetto (October 1917), German reinforcements helped Austria-Hungary win a decisive victory.

After Caporetto, Italy’s allies jumped in to offer increased assistance. British and French—and later, American—troops arrived in the region, and the Allies began to take back the Italian Front.

World War I at Sea

In the years before World War I, the superiority of Britain’s Royal Navy was unchallenged by any other nation’s fleet, but the Imperial German Navy had made substantial strides in closing the gap between the two naval powers. Germany’s strength on the high seas was also aided by its lethal fleet of U-boat submarines.

After the Battle of Dogger Bank in January 1915, in which the British mounted a surprise attack on German ships in the North Sea, the German navy chose not to confront Britain’s mighty Royal Navy in a major battle for more than a year, preferring to rest the bulk of its naval strategy on its U-boats.

The biggest naval engagement of World War I, the Battle of Jutland (May 1916) left British naval superiority on the North Sea intact, and Germany would make no further attempts to break an Allied naval blockade for the remainder of the war.

World War I Planes

World War I was the first major conflict to harness the power of planes. Though not as impactful as the British Royal Navy or Germany’s U-boats, the use of planes in World War I presaged their later, pivotal role in military conflicts around the globe.

At the dawn of World War I, aviation was a relatively new field; the Wright brothers took their first sustained flight just eleven years before, in 1903. Aircraft were initially used primarily for reconnaissance missions. During the First Battle of the Marne, information passed from pilots allowed the allies to exploit weak spots in the German lines, helping the Allies to push Germany out of France.

The first machine guns were successfully mounted on planes in June of 1912 in the United States, but were imperfect; if timed incorrectly, a bullet could easily destroy the propeller of the plane it came from. The Morane-Saulnier L, a French plane, provided a solution: The propeller was armored with deflector wedges that prevented bullets from hitting it. The Morane-Saulnier Type L was used by the French, the British Royal Flying Corps (part of the Army), the British Royal Navy Air Service and the Imperial Russian Air Service. The British Bristol Type 22 was another popular model used for both reconnaissance work and as a fighter plane.

Dutch inventor Anthony Fokker improved upon the French deflector system in 1915. His “interrupter” synchronized the firing of the guns with the plane’s propeller to avoid collisions. Though his most popular plane during WWI was the single-seat Fokker Eindecker, Fokker created over 40 kinds of airplanes for the Germans.

The Allies debuted the Handley-Page HP O/400, the first two-engine bomber, in 1915. As aerial technology progressed, long-range heavy bombers like Germany’s Gotha G.V. (first introduced in 1917) were used to strike cities like London. Their speed and maneuverability proved to be far deadlier than Germany’s earlier Zeppelin raids.

By the war’s end, the Allies were producing five times more aircraft than the Germans. On April 1, 1918, the British created the Royal Air Force, or RAF, the first air force to be a separate military branch independent from the navy or army. 

Second Battle of the Marne

With Germany able to build up its strength on the Western Front after the armistice with Russia, Allied troops struggled to hold off another German offensive until promised reinforcements from the United States were able to arrive.

On July 15, 1918, German troops launched what would become the last German offensive of the war, attacking French forces (joined by 85,000 American troops as well as some of the British Expeditionary Force) in the Second Battle of the Marne . The Allies successfully pushed back the German offensive and launched their own counteroffensive just three days later.

After suffering massive casualties, Germany was forced to call off a planned offensive further north, in the Flanders region stretching between France and Belgium, which was envisioned as Germany’s best hope of victory.

The Second Battle of the Marne turned the tide of war decisively towards the Allies, who were able to regain much of France and Belgium in the months that followed.

The Harlem Hellfighters and Other All-Black Regiments

By the time World War I began, there were four all-Black regiments in the U.S. military: the 24th and 25th Infantry and the 9th and 10th Cavalry. All four regiments comprised of celebrated soldiers who fought in the Spanish-American War and American-Indian Wars , and served in the American territories. But they were not deployed for overseas combat in World War I. 

Blacks serving alongside white soldiers on the front lines in Europe was inconceivable to the U.S. military. Instead, the first African American troops sent overseas served in segregated labor battalions, restricted to menial roles in the Army and Navy, and shutout of the Marines, entirely. Their duties mostly included unloading ships, transporting materials from train depots, bases and ports, digging trenches, cooking and maintenance, removing barbed wire and inoperable equipment, and burying soldiers.

Facing criticism from the Black community and civil rights organizations for its quotas and treatment of African American soldiers in the war effort, the military formed two Black combat units in 1917, the 92nd and 93rd Divisions . Trained separately and inadequately in the United States, the divisions fared differently in the war. The 92nd faced criticism for their performance in the Meuse-Argonne campaign in September 1918. The 93rd Division, however, had more success. 

With dwindling armies, France asked America for reinforcements, and General John Pershing , commander of the American Expeditionary Forces, sent regiments in the 93 Division to over, since France had experience fighting alongside Black soldiers from their Senegalese French Colonial army. The 93 Division’s 369 regiment, nicknamed the Harlem Hellfighters , fought so gallantly, with a total of 191 days on the front lines, longer than any AEF regiment, that France awarded them the Croix de Guerre for their heroism. More than 350,000 African American soldiers would serve in World War I in various capacities.

Toward Armistice

By the fall of 1918, the Central Powers were unraveling on all fronts.

Despite the Turkish victory at Gallipoli, later defeats by invading forces and an Arab revolt that destroyed the Ottoman economy and devastated its land, and the Turks signed a treaty with the Allies in late October 1918.

Austria-Hungary, dissolving from within due to growing nationalist movements among its diverse population, reached an armistice on November 4. Facing dwindling resources on the battlefield, discontent on the homefront and the surrender of its allies, Germany was finally forced to seek an armistice on November 11, 1918, ending World War I.

Treaty of Versailles

At the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, Allied leaders stated their desire to build a post-war world that would safeguard itself against future conflicts of such a devastating scale.

Some hopeful participants had even begun calling World War I “the War to End All Wars.” But the Treaty of Versailles , signed on June 28, 1919, would not achieve that lofty goal.

Saddled with war guilt, heavy reparations and denied entrance into the League of Nations , Germany felt tricked into signing the treaty, having believed any peace would be a “peace without victory,” as put forward by President Wilson in his famous Fourteen Points speech of January 1918.

As the years passed, hatred of the Versailles treaty and its authors settled into a smoldering resentment in Germany that would, two decades later, be counted among the causes of World War II .

World War I Casualties

World War I took the lives of more than 9 million soldiers; 21 million more were wounded. Civilian casualties numbered close to 10 million. The two nations most affected were Germany and France, each of which sent some 80 percent of their male populations between the ages of 15 and 49 into battle.

The political disruption surrounding World War I also contributed to the fall of four venerable imperial dynasties: Germany, Austria-Hungary, Russia and Turkey.

Legacy of World War I

World War I brought about massive social upheaval, as millions of women entered the workforce to replace men who went to war and those who never came back. The first global war also helped to spread one of the world’s deadliest global pandemics, the Spanish flu epidemic of 1918, which killed an estimated 20 to 50 million people.

World War I has also been referred to as “the first modern war.” Many of the technologies now associated with military conflict—machine guns, tanks , aerial combat and radio communications—were introduced on a massive scale during World War I.

The severe effects that chemical weapons such as mustard gas and phosgene had on soldiers and civilians during World War I galvanized public and military attitudes against their continued use. The Geneva Convention agreements, signed in 1925, restricted the use of chemical and biological agents in warfare and remain in effect today.

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History Resources

Historical Context: The Global Effect of World War I

By steven mintz.

A recent list of the hundred most important news stories of the twentieth century ranked the onset of World War I eighth. This is a great error. Just about everything that happened in the remainder of the century was in one way or another a result of World War I, including the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, World War II, the Holocaust, and the development of the atomic bomb. The Great Depression, the Cold War, and the collapse of European colonialism can also be traced, at least indirectly, to the First World War.

World War I killed more people--more than 9 million soldiers, sailors, and flyers and another 5 million civilians--involved more countries--28--and cost more money--$186 billion in direct costs and another $151 billion in indirect costs--than any previous war in history. It was the first war to use airplanes, tanks, long range artillery, submarines, and poison gas. It left at least 7 million men permanently disabled.

World War I probably had more far-reaching consequences than any other proceeding war. Politically, it resulted in the downfall of four monarchies--in Russia in 1917, in Austria-Hungary and Germany in 1918, and in Turkey in 1922. It contributed to the Bolshevik rise to power in Russia in 1917 and the triumph of fascism in Italy in 1922. It ignited colonial revolts in the Middle East and in Southeast Asia.

Economically, the war severely disrupted the European economies and allowed the United States to become the world's leading creditor and industrial power. The war also brought vast social consequences, including the mass murder of Armenians in Turkey and an influenza epidemic that killed over 25 million people worldwide.

Few events better reveal the utter unpredictability of the future. At the dawn of the 20th century, most Europeans looked forward to a future of peace and prosperity. Europe had not fought a major war for 100 years. But a belief in human progress was shattered by World War I, a war few wanted or expected. At any point during the five weeks leading up to the outbreak of fighting the conflict might have been averted. World War I was a product of miscalculation, misunderstanding, and miscommunication.

No one expected a war of the magnitude or duration of World War I. At first the armies relied on outdated methods of communication, such as carrier pigeons. The great powers mobilized more than a million horses. But by the time the conflict was over, tanks, submarines, airplane-dropped bombs, machine guns, and poison gas had transformed the nature of modern warfare. In 1918, the Germans fired shells containing both tear gas and lethal chlorine. The tear gas forced the British to remove their gas masks; the chlorine then scarred their faces and killed them.

In a single day at the Battle of the Somme in 1916, 100,000 British troops plodded across no man's land into steady machine-gun fire from German trenches a few yards away. Some 60,000 were killed or wounded. At the end of the battle, 419,654 British men were killed, missing, or wounded.Four years of war killed a million troops from the British Empire, 1.5 million troops from the Hapsburg Empire, 1.7 million French troops, 1.7 million Russians, and 2 million German troops. The war left a legacy of bitterness that contributed to World War II twenty-one years later.

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Effects of World War 1: What Exactly Were They?

The effects of World War 1 are still being felt a century after its conclusion. It was the deadliest war that involved more countries and was more expensive than any other war before it. The weapons used during WW1 were also more advanced than any previous war, using tanks, submarines, poison gas, airplanes, and long-range artillery. Over 9 million military personnel died during this war, and over 7 million men were left permanently disabled. It is not surprising that the effects of WW1 were still evident decades later.

Specific Effects of World War 1:

For more on the effects of World War 1, be sure to listen to the podcast episode below:

“Far-Reaching Effects of WW1”

Listen to the full “History Unplugged” podcast  here !

• WW1 caused the downfall of four monarchies: Germany, Turkey, Austria-Hungary, and Russia.
• The war made people more open to other ideologies, such as the Bolsheviks that came to power in Russia and fascism that triumphed in Italy and even later in Germany.
• WW1 largely marked the end of colonialism, as the people became more nationalistic and one country after the other started colonial revolts in Southeast Asia, the Middle East, and Africa.
• The war changed the economical balance of the world, leaving European countries deep in debt and making the U.S. the leading industrial power and creditor in the world.
• Inflation shot up in most countries and the German economy was highly affected by having to pay for reparations.
• With troops traveling all over the world, influenza was spread easily and an epidemic started which killed more than 25 million people across the world.
• With all the new weapons that were used, WW1 changed the face of modern warfare forever.
• Due to the cruel methods used during the war and the losses suffered, WW1 caused a lot of bitterness among nations, which also greatly contributed to WW1 decades later.
• Social life also changed: women had to run businesses while the men were at war and labor laws started to be enforced due to mass production and mechanization. People all wanted better living standards.
• After WW1, the need for an international body of nations that promotes security and peace worldwide became evident. This caused the founding of the League of Nations.
• WW1 boosted research in technology because better transport and means of communication gave countries an advantage over their enemies.
• The harsh conditions of the Treaty of Versailles caused a lot of dissent in Europe, especially on the side of the Central Powers who had to pay a lot for financial reparations.

There are many other effects one can attribute to WW1, but the fact of the matter is that after this devastating war, the world would never be the same again. Many historians agree that WW1 created an atmosphere that allowed the rise of the Nazi Party and the start of WW2. Click here to find out more!

“World War 1 and Its Effects of World War 2”

How Many People Died in World War 1?

World War One  was one of the deadliest conflicts in the history of the human race, in which over 16 million people died. The total number of both civilian and military casualties is estimated at around 37 million people. The war killed almost 7 million civilians and 10 million military personnel.

Military and Civilian Deaths on Both Sides

The Allies, or  Entente Powers , counted around 6 million deaths, the Central Powers 4 million.

Click here to learn about the impacts of World War One.

“Effects of World War 1: Loss of Life and Psychological Impact”

Many people died, not from combat, but from diseases caused by the war, a figure estimated at around 2 million deaths. 6 million people went missing during the war and were presumed dead.

Two out of three soldiers died in battle, the rest died due to infections or disease. The Spanish flu also killed a lot of people in prisoner camps.

The total number of civilian deaths is very hard to determine, unlike military deaths, which were better documented. Because of the war, many people suffered from disease and malnutrition because of food shortages brought about by a disruption in trade. Millions of men were also mobilized for the war, taking their labor away from farms, which cut down food production. In the Ottoman Empire, there were also the genocides that killed thousands of people. The Spanish flu also killed a lot of people, but historians often left these figures out of accounts.

Finally, there are even more indirect deaths caused by the wars that are not accounted in such reports. The Armenian Genocide, which left 1.5 million dead in the final years of the Ottoman Empire, was precipitated by the Ottoman political leadership believing that the Armenian people would side with Russia in World War One, leading to the empire’s ruin. To secure their borders, they put Armenian men in work camps, which became extermination centers, and forced marched the elderly, women, and children to Northern Syria, which became a death march.

Remembrance Day

Remembrance Day, often referred to as Poppy Day commemorates the sacrifice made by servicemen in times of war.

In the United Kingdom, the day was first commemorated in 1919, when it was known as Armistice Day, with two minutes of silence at 11 am on 11th November. The day marked the anniversary of the signing of the Armistice that brought World War One to an end in 1918. Its name was changed to Remembrance Day after World War Two. The day is also observed by other commonwealth countries.

In the United Kingdom, two minutes of silence is observed each year on the 11th of November. On the second Sunday in November, Remembrance Sunday, special services are held and poppy wreaths are laid at the Cenotaph in London and at war memorials in towns all over the country.

The poppy is used to symbolize remembrance and in the United Kingdom, the Royal British Legion sells poppies in the weeks prior to 11th November to raise money for servicemen and their families.

During World War One some of the most intense fightings took place in Flanders (west Belgium). Buildings, roads, fields, bushes, and trees were destroyed. However, despite the devastation, poppies flowered each spring. Poppy seeds that had been buried for years were brought to the surface by the churned-up mud and germinated.

John McCrae, a Canadian fighting in the trenches in Flanders wrote a poem called ‘In Flanders Fields’. The poem was published and the poppy was adopted as a symbol for those who had lost their lives in battle.

In Flanders Fields by John McCrae May 1915

In Flanders fields the poppies blow Between the crosses, row on row, That mark our place; and in the sky The larks, still bravely singing, fly Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow, Loved and were loved, and now we lie In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe: To you from failing hands we throw The torch; be yours to hold it high. If ye break faith with us who die We shall not sleep, though poppies grow In Flanders fields.

This article is part of our larger selection of posts about World War One. To learn more,  click here for our comprehensive guide to World War One.

Additional Resources About World War One

World war 1: a comprehensive overview of the great war, ww1 trenches: the heart of battle how did they work, world war one – assassination of franz ferdinand, what was the purpose of the gallipoli campaign, cite this article.

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World War I Changed America and Transformed Its Role in International Relations

So why don't we pay more attention to it.

—Library of Congress

The entry of the United States into World War I changed the course of the war, and the war, in turn, changed America. Yet World War I receives short shrift in the American consciousness. 

Recruiting poster for the U.S. Army by Herbert Paus.

Detail of a recruiting poster for YWCA by Ernest Hamlin Baker.

The American Expeditionary Forces arrived in Europe in 1917 and helped turn the tide in favor of Britain and France, leading to an Allied victory over Germany and Austria in November 1918. By the time of the armistice, more than four million Americans had served in the armed forces and 116,708 had lost their lives. The war shaped the writings of Ernest Hemingway and John Dos Passos. It helped forge the military careers of Dwight D. Eisenhower, George S. Patton, and George C. Marshall. On the home front, millions of women went to work, replacing the men who had shipped off to war, while others knitted socks and made bandages. For African-American soldiers, the war opened up a world not bound by America’s formal and informal racial codes. 

And we are still grappling with one of the major legacies of World War I: the debate over America’s role in the world. For three years, the United States walked the tightrope of neutrality as President Woodrow Wilson opted to keep the country out of the bloodbath consuming Europe. Even as Germany’s campaign of unrestricted submarine warfare in the Atlantic put American sailors and ships in jeopardy, the United States remained aloof. But after the Zimmermann telegram revealed Germany’s plans to recruit Mexico to attack the United States if it did not remain neutral, Americans were ready to fight. 

In April 1917, President Wilson stood before Congress and said, “The world must be made safe for democracy.” With those words, he asked for a declaration of war, which Congress gave with gusto. For the first time in its history, the United States joined a coalition to fight a war not on its own soil or of its own making, setting a precedent that would be invoked repeatedly over the next century. 

“For most Americans, going to war in 1917 was about removing the German threat to the U.S. homeland,” says Michael S. Neiberg, professor of history at the U.S. Army War College. “But after the war, Wilson developed a much more expansive vision to redeem the sin of war through the founding of a new world order, which created controversy and bitterness in the United States.”

The burden of sending men off to die weighed on Wilson’s conscience. It was one reason why he proposed the creation of the League of Nations, an international body based on collective security. But joining the League required the United States to sacrifice a measure of sovereignty. When judged against the butcher’s bill of this war, Wilson thought it was a small price to pay. Others, like Wilson’s longtime nemesis Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, believed that the United States should be free to pursue its own interests and not be beholden to an international body. America hadn’t fought a war only to relinquish its newfound stature as a military power. 

As soldiers returned home and the victory parades faded, the fight over the League of Nations turned bitter. The sense of accomplishment quickly evaporated. “Then came the Depression (a direct result of the war) and another global crisis,” says Neiberg. “All of that made memory of World War I a difficult thing for Americans to engage with after about 1930.” 

Even as the world has changed, the positions staked out by Wilson and Lodge have not evolved much over the past one hundred years. When new storm clouds gathered in Europe during the 1930s, Lodge’s argument was repurposed by isolationists as “America First,” a phrase that has come back into vogue as yet another example of the war’s enduring influence. “The war touched everything around the globe. Our entire world was shaped by it, even if we do not always make the connections,” Neiberg says. 

Historian and writer A. Scott Berg emphatically agrees. “I think World War I is the most underrecognized significant event of the last several centuries. The stories from this global drama—and its larger-than-life characters—are truly the stuff of Greek tragedy and are of Biblical  proportion; and modern America’s very identity was forged during this war.”

A biographer of Wilson and Charles Lindbergh, Berg has now cast his eye as an editor across the rich corpus of contemporaneous writing to produce  World War I and America , a nearly one-thousand-page book of letters, speeches, diary entries, newspaper reports, and personal accounts. This new volume from Library of America starts with the  New York Times  story of the assassination of Franz Ferdinand in July 1914 and concludes with an excerpt from John Dos Passos’s novel  1919 . In between, the voices of soldiers, politicians, nurses, diplomats, journalists, suffragettes, and intellectuals ask questions that are still with us. 

“What is America’s role in the world? Are our claims to moral leadership abroad undercut by racial injustice at home? What do we owe those who serve in our wars?” asks Max Rudin, Library of America’s publisher. With 2017 marking the one-hundredth anniversary of America's entry into the war, the moment seemed ripe to revisit a conflict whose ghosts still haunt the nation. “It offered an opportunity to raise awareness about a generation of American writers that cries out to be better known,” says Rudin. 

The volume shows off familiar names in surprising places. Nellie Bly and Edith Wharton report from the front lines. Henry Morgenthau Sr., the ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, files increasingly terrifying reports on the Armenian genocide. As Teddy Roosevelt leads the fight for American intervention, Jane Addams and Emma Goldman question the aims of the war. Writing from Italy, Ernest Hemingway complains to his family about being wounded. While Wilson and Lodge fight over American sovereignty, Ezra Pound expresses his disillusionment and grief in verse. 

We also meet Floyd Gibbons, a  Chicago Tribune  crime reporter. Before the war he covered plenty of shootings, but “I could never learn from the victims what the precise feeling was as the piece of lead struck.” He found out in June 1918 at Belleau Wood when a German bullet found him—“the lighted end of a cigarette touched me in the fleshy part of my upper left arm.” A second bullet also found his shoulder, spawning a large burning sensation. “And then the third one struck me. . . . It sounded to me like some one had dropped a glass bottle into a porcelain bathtub. A barrel of whitewash tipped over and it seemed that everything in the world turned white.” The third bullet had found his left eye. 

Stepping into an operating theater with Mary Borden, the Chicago heiress who established hospitals in France and Belgium, the smell of blood and death almost leaps off the page. “We send our men up the broken road between bushes of barbed wire and they come back to us, one by one, two by two in ambulances, lying on stretchers. They lie on their backs on the stretchers and are pulled out of the ambulances as loaves of bread are pulled out of the oven.” As a wounded soldier is laid out, “we conspire against his right to die. We experiment with his bones, his muscles, his sinews, his blood. We dig into the yawning mouths of his wounds. Helpless openings, they let us into the secret places of his body.”

When the American Expeditionary Forces shipped off to Europe, so too did approximately 16,500 women. They worked as clerks, telephone operators, and nurses; they also ran canteens that served meals to soldiers and offered a respite from battle. “These women often had complex motivations, such as a desire for adventure or professional advancement, and often witnessed more carnage than male soldiers, creating unacknowledged problems with PTSD when they returned home,” says Jennifer Keene, professor of history at Chapman University.

Of course, most women experienced the war stateside, where they tended victory gardens and worked to produce healthy meals from meager rations. They volunteered for the Red Cross and participated in Liberty Loan drives. As Willa Cather learned when she decamped from New York to Red Cloud, Nebraska, in the summer of 1918, the war could be consuming. “In New York the war was one of many subjects people talked about; but in Omaha, Lincoln, in my own town, and the other towns along the Republican Valley, and over in the north of Kansas, there was nothing but the war.” 

In the Library of America volume, W. E. B. Du Bois, who, in the wake of Booker T. Washington’s death, assumed the mantle of spokesman for the black community, provides another take. From the beginning, Du Bois saw the war as grounded in the colonial rivalries and aspirations of the European belligerents. 

Chad Williams, associate professor of African and Afro-American Studies at Brandeis University, says Du Bois was ahead of his time. “His writings also vividly illuminated the tensions between the professed democratic aims of the Allies—and the United States in particular—and the harsh realities of white supremacy, domestically and globally, for black people. Du Bois hoped that by supporting the American war effort and encouraging African-American patriotism, this tension could be reconciled. He was ultimately—and tragically—wrong.” 

Along with Du Bois’s commentary, there are reports on the race riots in East St. Louis and Houston in 1917. Such incidents prompted James Weldon Johnson to cast aside sentimentality and answer the question, “Why should a Negro fight?”

“America is the American Negro’s country,” he wrote. “He has been here three hundred years; that is, about two hundred years longer than most of the white people.” 

The U.S. Army shunted African-American soldiers into segregated units and issued them shovels more often than rifles. Some, however, fought alongside the French as equals, prompting questions about their treatment by their own country. African-American soldiers came home as citizens of the world with questions about their place in American society. “Understanding how the war impacted black people and the importance of this legacy is endlessly fascinating and, given our current times, extremely relevant,” says Williams.

To accompany its World War I volume, Library of America has launched a nationwide program, featuring scholars, to foster discussion about the war and its legacy. One hundred twenty organizations, from libraries to historical societies, are hosting events that involve veterans, their families, and their communities.

“There are veterans of recent conflicts in every community in America for whom the experiences and issues raised by World War I are very immediate,” says Rudin. “We all have something to learn from that.”

“Every war is distinct, and yet every war has almost eerie commonalities with wars past,” says Phil Klay, author of  Redeployment , a collection of short stories about his service in Iraq that won the National Book Award. “I don’t think veterans have a unique authority in these discussions, but our personal experiences do inevitably infuse our reading. In my case, I find myself relentlessly drawn to pull lessons for the future from these readings, as the moral stakes of war have a visceral feel for me.” 

For community programs, Library of America developed a slimmer version of its volume, World War I and America, while adding introductory essays and discussion questions. Keene, Neiberg, and Williams, along with Edward Lengel, served as editors. “There is truly not one part of the nation that was untouched by the war,” says Williams. “This project has the potential to remind people of its far-reaching significance and perhaps uncover new stories about the American experience in the war that we have not yet heard.”

Berg echoes the sentiment. “I hope audiences will appreciate the presence of World War I in our lives today—whether it is our economy, race relations, women’s rights, xenophobia, free speech, or the foundation of American foreign policy for the last one hundred years: They all have their roots in World War I.”

Meredith Hindley is a senior writer for Humanities .

Funding information

Library of America received $500,000  from NEH for nationwide library programs, a traveling exhibition, a website, and a publication of an anthology exploring how World War I reshaped American lives. For more information about the project, visit ww1america.org

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Course: US history   >   Unit 7

• The presidency of Woodrow Wilson
• Blockades, u-boats and sinking of the Lusitania
• Zimmermann Telegram
• United States enters World War I
• World War I: Homefront

The United States in World War I

• Woodrow Wilson's Fourteen Points
• Paris Peace Conference and Treaty of Versailles
• More detail on the Treaty of Versailles and Germany
• The League of Nations
• The Treaty of Versailles
• The First World War

• World War I was the deadliest conflict until that point in human history, claiming tens of millions of casualties on all sides.
• Under President Woodrow Wilson, the United States remained neutral until 1917 and then entered the war on the side of the Allied powers (the United Kingdom, France, and Russia).
• The experience of World War I had a major impact on US domestic politics, culture, and society. Women achieved the right to vote, while other groups of American citizens were subject to systematic repression.

War in Europe and US neutrality

Principal combatants on each side included:, the united states enters world war i, world war i on the home front, aftermath: consequences of world war i, what do you think.

• For more on the origins of the First World War, see Margaret MacMillan, The War that Ended Peace: The Road to 1914 (New York: Random House, 2014).
• For more on the nature of the fighting on the Western front, see Ian Ousby, The Road to Verdun: World War I’s Most Momentous Battle and the Folly of Nationalism (New York: Random House, 2002).
• Christopher Capozzola, Uncle Sam Wants You: World War I and the Making of the Modern American Citizen (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 7.
• For more on the experience of American soldiers in WWI, see Edward M. Coffman, The War to End All Wars: The American Military Experience in World War I (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1998).
• For more on the women’s rights movement, see Eleanor Flexner and Ellen Fitzpatrick, Century of Struggle: The Woman’s Rights Movement in the United States (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1996).
• For more, see Capozzola, Uncle Sam Wants You.
• For more, see John Milton Cooper, Jr., Breaking the Heart of the World: Woodrow Wilson and the Fight for the League of Nations (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010).

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The Consequences of World War I

Political and Social Effects of the War to End All Wars

Imperial War Museum/Wikimedia Commons/Public Domain

A New Great Power

Socialism rises to the world stage, the collapse of central and eastern european empires, nationalism transforms and complicates europe, the myths of victory and failure.

• The Largest Loss: A 'Lost Generation'
• M.A., Medieval Studies, Sheffield University
• B.A., Medieval Studies, Sheffield University

World War I was fought on battlefields throughout Europe between 1914 and 1918 . It involved human slaughter on a previously unprecedented scale—and its consequences were enormous. The human and structural devastation left Europe and the world greatly changed in almost all facets of life, setting the stage for political convulsions throughout the remainder of the century.

Before its entry into World War I, the United States of America was a nation of untapped military potential and growing economic might. But the war changed the United States in two important ways: the country's military was turned into a large-scale fighting force with the intense experience of modern war, a force that was clearly equal to that of the old Great Powers; and the balance of economic power began to shift from the drained nations of Europe to America.

However, the dreadful toll taken by the war led U.S. politicians to retreat from the world and return to a policy of isolationism. That isolation initially limited the impact of America's growth, which would only truly come to fruition in the aftermath of World War II. This retreat also undermined the League of Nations and the emerging new political order.

The collapse of Russia under the pressure of total warfare allowed socialist revolutionaries to seize power  and turn communism, one of the world’s growing ideologies, into a major European force. While the global socialist revolution that Vladimir Lenin believed was coming never happened, the presence of a huge and potentially powerful communist nation in Europe and Asia changed the balance of world politics.

Germany's politics initially tottered toward joining Russia, but eventually pulled back from experiencing a full Leninist change and formed a new social democracy. This would come under great pressure and fail from the challenge of Germany's right, whereas Russia's authoritarian regime after the tsarists lasted for decades.

The German, Russian, Turkish, and Austro-Hungarian Empires all fought in World War I, and all were swept away by defeat and revolution, although not necessarily in that order. The fall of Turkey in 1922 from a revolution stemming directly from the war, as well as that of Austria-Hungary, was probably not that much of a surprise: Turkey had long been regarded as the sick man of Europe, and vultures had circled its territory for decades. Austria-Hungary appeared close behind.

But the fall of the young, powerful, and growing German Empire, after the people revolted and the Kaiser was forced to abdicate, came as a great shock. In their place came a rapidly changing series of new governments, ranging in structure from democratic republics to socialist dictatorships.

Nationalism had been growing in Europe for decades before World War I began, but the war's aftermath saw a major rise in new nations and independence movements. Part of this was a result of Woodrow Wilson’s isolationist commitment to what he called "self-determination." But part of it was also a response to the destabilization of old empires, which nationalists viewed as an opportunity to declare new nations.

The key region for European nationalism was Eastern Europe and the Balkans, where Poland, the three Baltic States, Czechoslovakia, the Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes , and others emerged. But nationalism conflicted hugely with the ethnic makeup of this region of Europe, where many different nationalities and ethnicities sometimes lived in tension with one another. Eventually, internal conflicts stemming from new self-determination by national majorities arose from disaffected minorities who preferred the rule of neighbors.

German commander Erich Ludendorff suffered a mental collapse before he called for an armistice to end the war, and when he recovered and discovered the terms he had signed onto, he insisted Germany refuse them, claiming the army could fight on. But the new civilian government overruled him, as once peace had been established there was no way to keep the army fighting. The civilian leaders who overruled Ludendorff became scapegoats for both the army and Ludendorff himself.

Thus began, at the very close of the war, the myth of the undefeated German army being "stabbed in the back" by liberals, socialists, and Jews who had damaged the Weimar Republic and fueled the rise of Hitler. That myth came directly from Ludendorff setting up the civilians for the fall. Italy didn’t receive as much land as it had been promised in secret agreements, and Italian right-wingers exploited this to complain of a "mutilated peace."

In contrast, in Britain, the successes of 1918 which had been won partly by their soldiers were increasingly ignored, in favor of viewing the war and all war as a bloody catastrophe. This affected their response to international events in the 1920s and 1930s; arguably, the policy of appeasement was born from the ashes of World War I.

The Largest Loss: A 'Lost Generation'

While it is not strictly true that a whole generation was lost—and some historians have complained about the term—eight million people died during World War I, which was perhaps one in eight of the combatants. In most of the Great Powers, it was hard to find anyone who had not lost someone to the war. Many other people had been wounded or shell-shocked so badly they killed themselves, and these casualties are not reflected in the figures.

• 5 Key Causes of World War I
• World War I Timeline From 1914 to 1919
• Causes of World War I and the Rise of Germany
• The Causes and War Aims of World War One
• The Major Alliances of World War I
• The German Revolution of 1918 – 19
• World War I Introduction and Overview
• World War I: A Battle to the Death
• Key Historical Figures of World War I
• The Fourteen Points of Woodrow Wilson's Plan for Peace
• World War I: Opening Campaigns
• The Countries Involved in World War I
• The US Economy in World War I
• How the Treaty of Versailles Contributed to Hitler's Rise
• The November Criminals
• Causes of World War II

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A War to End All Innocence

By A.O. Scott

• June 20, 2014

“I feel like a soldier on the morning after the Somme.” This line of dialogue, from an episode in the second season of the BBC series “ Call the Midwife ,” caught my ear recently as an especially piquant morsel of period detail. It is uttered by a doctor to a nurse after they have just assisted in a grueling home birth, an experience that is compared to the four-month battle in a muddy stretch of Picardy beginning on July 1, 1916, that was, at the time, the bloodiest episode of combat in human history, generating 60,000 casualties in a single day of fighting on the British side alone. The doctor’s comparison is surely metaphorical overkill, but it also represents a familiar style of wit, a habit of linking the challenges we regularly endure with calamities we can scarcely imagine.

But why choose that particular calamity? “Call the Midwife,” based on a popular series of memoirs by Jennifer Worth, takes place in the late 1950s, not long after a war that, in terms of the sheer scale and extent of global slaughter, far eclipsed its predecessor. It is interesting that for this youngish doctor and nurse, the earlier conflict comes more readily to mind. The Somme is more accessible, and perhaps more immediate, than Dunkirk or D-Day.

The allusion may require a footnote now, but its occurrence in a television program that is acutely sensitive to historical accuracy is a sign of just how deeply, if in some ways obscurely, World War I remains embedded in the popular consciousness. Publicized in its day as “the war to end all wars,” it has instead become the war to which all subsequent wars, and much else in modern life, seem to refer. Words and phrases once specifically associated with the experience of combat on the Western Front are still part of the common language. We barely recognize “in the trenches,” “no man’s land” or “ over the top “ as figures of speech, much less as images that evoke what was once a novel form of organized mass death. And we seldom notice that our collective understanding of what has happened in foxholes, jungles, mountains and deserts far removed in space and time from the sandbags and barbed wire of France and Belgium is filtered through the blood, smoke and misery of those earlier engagements.

One person who did notice the lasting and decisive cultural influence of World War I was Paul Fussell, a literary scholar and World War II infantry veteran whose 1975 book, “ The Great War and Modern Memory ,” remains a tour de force of passionate, learned criticism. Fussell, who died in 2012, combed through novels, memoirs and poems written in the wake of the war and found that they established a pattern that would continue to hold, consciously and not, for much of the 20th century.

Many British soldiers and officers arrived at the front steeped in a literary tradition that colored their perception — a tradition that included not only martial epics and popular adventure novels but also religious and romantic allegories like John Bunyan’s “The Pilgrim’s Progress.” The central character in that 17th-century tale of desperate hardship and ultimate redemption is first seen as “a man clothed in rags” with “a great burden upon his back,” a description that seemed uncannily to prefigure the trench-weary conscript with his tattered uniform and heavy pack.

That soldier, in turn, with some adjustments of outfit and equipment, would march through the subsequent decades, leaving behind a corpus of remarkably consistent firsthand testimony. Whether presented as memoir or fiction, post-1918 war writing returns again and again to the same themes and attitudes. Among them are an emphasis on the tedium and terror of ground combat; the privileging of the ordinary soldier’s perspective over that of officers or strategists; a suspicion of authority and a tendency to mock those who wield it; a strong sense of the unbridgeable existential division between those who fight and the people back home; a taste for absurdity, sarcasm and black humor; and the conclusion that, whatever the outcome or justice of the war as a whole, its legacy for the individual veteran will be cynicism and disillusionment.

Fussell found these traits in the literature of his own war — in “The Naked and the Dead,” “Catch-22” and “Gravity’s Rainbow” — and they saturate the Vietnam narratives that followed the publication of his book. The title of “The Things They Carried,” Tim O’Brien’s cycle of autobiographical stories about life before, during and after combat in Vietnam, carries an echo of “The Pilgrim’s Progress,” and its blend of economical prose, blunt naturalism and surreal terror makes it both a definitive account of its own war and a recapitulation of the Great One.

Like nearly every other male writer in English to have tackled the subject of war, Mr. O’Brien owes a clear debt to Hemingway, who came as close to anyone to striking a template for how it should be dealt with in a famous passage from “A Farewell to Arms”:

“There were many words that you could not stand to hear and finally only the names of places had dignity. Certain numbers were the same way and certain dates and these with the names of the places were all you could say and have them mean anything. Abstract words such as glory, honor, courage, or hallow were obscene beside the concrete names of villages, the numbers of roads, the names of rivers, the numbers of regiments and the dates.”

This tough wisdom — itself curiously abstract, in spite of its insistence on specificity — has remained in effect even as the geography has changed. The imperative to tell what really happened, even to a public or a posterity incapable of fully understanding, has produced a literature full of names and dates. Verdun, Passchendaele, Gallipoli, Guadalcanal, Monte Cassino, Stalingrad, Inchon, Khe Sanh, Kandahar, Fallujah. Nov. 11; June 6; Tet; Sept. 11.

In 1964, 50 years after the war began, Philip Larkin, born in 1922, published a memorial poem called “ MCMXIV .” Larkin’s subject is less the war as such than a faded England of “archaic faces” and bygone habits, an England that ceased to exist sometime between the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo on June 28 and the commencement of full, continent-engulfing hostilities at the beginning of August. The poem tries to freeze the moment when the older world — a world his parents knew intimately but one that lay just beyond the horizon of his own memory — “changed itself to past without a word.”

“Never such innocence again,” Larkin concludes, summarizing what was, then and now, a crucial tenet of the conventional wisdom about the Great War, a notion that informed Hemingway’s rejection of the old, elevated language of honor and glory. Even as he acknowledges the seductive power of the idea of lost innocence, Larkin also suggests that it is complicated, even deceptive. Individuals like the anonymous children and husbands who populate his lines can easily be imagined as innocent. Imperial nation-states that have spent the last few centuries conquering most of the rest of the globe are another story.

This was clear enough to Larkin, whose patriotism rested on the notion that England was the worst place on earth with the possible exception of everywhere else. The first time he uses the phrase “Never such innocence” he qualifies it with “never before or since,” suggesting that the particular Edenic aura that hangs over the prewar months of 1914 may be its own kind of illusion. To imply that Britain (or for that matter any other combatant nation) was somehow more innocent than ever on the eve of catastrophe is to register an aftereffect of the catastrophe itself.

The war was so foul and terrible that it could only have erupted in a landscape of goodness and purity. That, at any rate, is one of the myths it leaves behind. Another, favored at the time by a handful of vanguard intellectuals (notably the Italian Futurists) and adapted by some later historians, was that the war accelerated tendencies already present in modern society: toward mechanized violence, total conflict and the fusion of technology and politics.

Accounts of that summer, especially in France and Britain, frequently emphasize beautiful weather and holiday pleasures. Gabriel Chevalier’s “ Fear ,” a novel of combat published in 1930, opens with “carefree France” in its “summer costumes.” “There wasn’t a cloud in the sky — such an optimistic, bright blue sky.” A lovely example of the interplay of empirical reality and literary embellishment: the meteorological record will attest to the color and clarity of the sky, but only the cruel, corrective irony of hindsight can summon the word “optimistic.”

And then: “In a few short days, civilization was wiped out.” This brutally concise sentence, a few pages into “Fear,” summarizes the loss of innocence that subsequent chapters of first-person narration will elaborate. But those chapters will also make clear the extent to which that “civilization,” so intoxicated by its own rhetoric of national glory and heroic destiny, was the author of its own extinction. The discrepancy between that lofty language and the horrific reality of war opens a chasm in human experience that, in Fussell’s account, has never closed: “I am saying,” he wrote, “that there seems to be one dominating form of modern understanding; that it is essentially ironic; and that it originates largely in the application of mind and memory to the events of the Great War.”

More recent events, and the imaginative response to them might indicate the extent to which minds can change, and memories fade. Chevalier’s “bright blue sky” can’t help evoking a certain late-summer sky over Manhattan almost 13 years ago, at another moment that would come to mark a boundary between Before and After.

After Sept. 11, 2001, we were told — we told ourselves — that everything had changed. In a curious reversal of the logic of the Great War, the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were widely and quickly understood to herald “the death of irony.” What this meant, at least at first, was that a cultural style dominated ( according to Roger Rosenblatt in Time , among others) by “detachment and personal whimsy” would give way to an ethic of seriousness and sincerity. But in retrospect, the obituaries for irony were not only premature; they were also part of an aggressive reassertion of innocence, a concerted attempt to refute the conclusion of Larkin’s “MCMXIV.”

There followed a rehabilitation of the abstract words that Hemingway and his lost generation had found so intolerable. Ordinary soldiers were routinely referred to as “heroes” and “warriors,” even as their deaths and injuries were kept from public view. Those at home were encouraged toward displays of patriotism and support but also urged to continue with the optimistic routines of work, leisure and shopping “as if it were all” (to quote Larkin) “an August Bank Holiday lark.”

But the Great War is not quite finished with us. As the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have wound down in bloody inconclusiveness, the men and women who served in them have started writing, and what they have produced should return us to the morning after the Somme. “ Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk ,” Ben Fountain’s award-winning 2012 novel, pushes past irony into farce as it juxtaposes the experiences of a battered platoon plunged from the chaos of Iraq into the vulgar spectacle of the Super Bowl, where their service is honored and exploited. The book belongs in the irreverent company of “Catch-22,” which is to say on the same shelf as “All Quiet on the Western Front” and Chevalier’s “Fear.”

Phil Klay’s “ Redeployment ,” meanwhile, published this year, follows in the hard-boiled, matter-of-fact line of Hemingway and “The Things They Carried.” A deceptively modest collection of linked short stories, “Redeployment” bristles with place names, military numbers and acronyms, grim humor, sexual frustration, sentimental friendship and contempt for authority. It could only have been written by someone who was there, even if “there,” with some adjustments of technology, idiom and climate, might just as well be Ypres as Ramadi. And the moral might have been written by the British memoirist Edmund Blunden, who derived a stark lesson from his own experience at the Battle of the Somme: “The War had won, and would go on winning.”

An article last Sunday about the effect World War I had on America’s cultural consciousness misidentified the era in which John Bunyan’s “The Pilgrim’s Progress” — an allegory of hardship and redemption that many British soldiers and officers were familiar with — came out. It was published in the 17th century, not during the medieval years.

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The Complex Origins and Lasting Impact of World War i

This essay is about the causes and consequences of World War I, also known as the Great War. It discusses the complex web of alliances, nationalism, militarism, and imperialism that contributed to the outbreak of the war following the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand. The essay highlights the unprecedented scale of the conflict, the technological advancements in warfare, and the devastating effects of trench warfare. It also examines the social and economic impacts on the home front, including the role of propaganda and changes in labor dynamics. The conclusion addresses the Treaty of Versailles and the lasting legacy of World War I on global politics and society.

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World War I, known colloquially as the Great War, stands as a monumental juncture that forever reshaped the trajectory of human history. Spanning the years 1914 to 1918, this epoch bore witness to unprecedented levels of devastation and human suffering, fundamentally altering the political, economic, and societal fabric of the 20th century. The genesis of this global cataclysm lies ensconced within a labyrinthine tapestry of alliances, rivalries, and geopolitical machinations that had simmered for decades.

The proximate catalyst for the conflict emerged with the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria-Hungary by Gavrilo Princip, a Bosnian Serb nationalist, on June 28, 1914.

This fateful event precipitated a cascading domino effect among the dominant powers of Europe, each bound by a web of entangled alliances and treaties. Austria-Hungary, bolstered by German support, promptly declared war on Serbia, prompting Russian mobilization. In response, Germany declared war on Russia, setting in motion a sequence of events that embroiled France, bound by its alliance with Russia, in a conflagration with Germany and, by extension, Austria-Hungary. Britain, spurred by its commitment to Belgian neutrality, entered the fray as Germany encroached upon Belgian soil. What commenced as a regional skirmish rapidly metastasized into a global maelstrom, ensnaring the preeminent powers of the era.

However, the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand merely served as the spark that ignited a conflagration of far greater proportions. The underlying underpinnings of World War I are manifold and convoluted. Nationalism, a potent force in the fin de siècle and early 20th century milieu, fomented a cauldron of fervent competition and animosity among nations. Each sovereign entity espoused a fervent belief in the preeminence of its culture, governance, and societal mores, vying for hegemony over its counterparts. This fervent sense of nationalistic pride, coupled with aspirations for hegemony and prestige, constituted potent catalysts for conflict.

Militarism, too, emerged as a pivotal factor. The dominant powers of Europe had engaged in a protracted arms race, diligently augmenting their military arsenals in a bid to outstrip their adversaries in terms of scale, sophistication, and lethality. This arms proliferation engendered an atmosphere wherein conflict was not merely conceivable but, in certain quarters, anticipated. Military strategists and tacticians devised intricate blueprints and contingency plans, predicated upon the assumption of inevitable warfare. When the crisis of 1914 materialized, these plans were swiftly set into motion, precipitating rapid mobilization and escalation.

Imperialism further exacerbated the simmering tensions that precipitated the conflict. The European powers had engaged in a frenzied scramble for colonies and spheres of influence across the globe, particularly in Africa and Asia. This imperialistic rivalry frequently precipitated clashes between colonial powers, fostering a volatile international milieu wherein each contender sought to outmaneuver its rivals.

The intricate network of alliances that had coalesced across Europe by the turn of the 20th century also played a decisive role in precipitating the conflict. While ostensibly crafted to foster security and deter aggression, these alliances engendered a scenario wherein conflict between two nations could swiftly embroil others. This labyrinthine nexus of alliances ensured that once hostilities commenced, the entangled alliances compelled allied nations to rally to their compatriots’ defense, thereby engendering a cascading cascade of conflict that engulfed the entire continent.

Upon the war’s commencement, it swiftly became apparent that it would deviate markedly from any preceding conflict. The scale of engagement was unprecedented, with millions of combatants mobilized and vast material resources marshaled for the war effort. Moreover, the very nature of warfare underwent a profound metamorphosis, owing to technological innovations and industrial advancements. Machine guns, artillery barrages, armored tanks, aerial bombardments, and chemical agents rendered the battlefield a harrowing theater of death and desolation.

Trench warfare emerged as the defining modality of combat along the Western Front. Combatants on both sides laboriously excavated extensive networks of trenches, wherein they subsisted, skirmished, and succumbed amidst appalling conditions. These subterranean warrens, stretching from the North Sea to the Swiss frontier, engendered a static front characterized by minimal territorial flux despite sustained offensives and counteroffensives. Engagements such as the Battle of the Somme and the Battle of Verdun exacted a staggering toll, with hundreds of thousands of soldiers perishing or suffering grievous wounds in exchange for marginal territorial gains.

The repercussions of the conflict were not confined solely to the battlefield. On the home front, the war precipitated seismic societal and economic convulsions. The wholesale mobilization of entire populations for the war effort precipitated profound shifts in labor dynamics, with women entering the workforce en masse to supplant their male counterparts. This paradigm shift precipitated a reevaluation of traditional gender roles and foreshadowed subsequent societal transformations.

Economically, the war imposed a prodigious strain upon the resources of all belligerent nations. Governments assumed control over industrial sectors, channeling economic output toward wartime exigencies and implementing rationing protocols to contend with scarcities. The financial exigencies of the conflict were staggering, engendering inflationary pressures, indebtedness, and economic volatility across numerous nations.

Propaganda emerged as a potent tool employed to buttress public support for the war effort and vilify the enemy. Governments meticulously curated information channels, censoring news reports and disseminating propaganda that lionized their own cause while demonizing their adversaries. This manipulation of public sentiment bolstered wartime morale but also engendered an atmosphere rife with animosity and suspicion, enduring long after the cessation of hostilities.

The denouement of the conflict arrived with the signing of the Armistice on November 11, 1918. The Treaty of Versailles, consummated in 1919, formally terminated the state of war between Germany and the Allied Powers. This treaty exacted onerous penalties upon Germany, including substantial territorial concessions, military demobilization, and reparations payments of punitive magnitude. Many historians posit that these draconian strictures contributed to the economic and political disquiet that ultimately precipitated World War II.

In the aftermath of the conflict, the geopolitical landscape of Europe underwent a seismic realignment, with new nations emerging and erstwhile empires unraveling. The Austro-Hungarian, Ottoman, Russian, and German empires all suffered profound territorial dismemberment, fostering the ascent of nascent nation-states and recalibrating the geopolitical calculus. Moreover, the war catalyzed substantial political transformations, including the advent of communism in Russia and the subsequent emergence of fascist regimes in Italy and Germany.

The legacy of World War I is indelible and far-reaching, heralding the demise of an epoch characterized by relative stability and inaugurating an era marred by conflict and upheaval. The conflict wrought profound alterations in international relations, warfare, and societal norms, laying the groundwork for epochal political upheavals. The lessons gleaned from the crucible of the Great War continue to resonate in contemporary geopolitics, underscoring the enduring significance of one of the most cataclysmic conflicts in human annals. The devastation wrought by World War I, coupled with the seismic political and social convulsions it engendered, left an indelible imprint upon the 20th century and continues to reverberate in the annals of history.

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The First World War’s Long- and Short-Term Causes Essay

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The First World War remains one of the most devastating historical events ever experienced. Numerous conflicts witnessed in Europe towards the end of the 19th century and the start of the 20th formed the basis for resentment, hate, and the arms race that led to the Great War. Still, the war had no single cause but emerged due to a combination of numerous long- and short-term factors. Notably, the formation of alliances and imperialism were the long-term causes, while the death of Archduke Ferdinand and Serbia’s failure to honor the ten-point ultimatum were the immediate causes of WW1.

Undoubtedly, the build-up towards the First World War started early in the mid-19th century due to imperialism. The industrialized European powers were competing for colonies across the world, especially in Asia and Africa ( World War I , n.d.). Apart from viewing imperialism as an economic venture, most Europeans perceived that their military, culture, and race were superior and should influence the entire world. As more European powers realized the financial advantage and prestige that came with colonies, the idea became more competitive to the extent of nations clashing and almost starting war.

Britain and France acquired the most significant share, which angered other European countries ( World War I , n.d.). As a result, rivalries emerged, but Britain and France perceived their vast colonies as confirmation of being influential states in Europe.

Imperialism created hostility and paved the way for the formation of alliances. After the Franco-Prussian war of 1871, the German states united while defeated France remained disgruntled after losing part of its territory, Loraine and Alsace ( World War I , n.d.).

To cushion herself from future war with Germany and Austria-Hungary, France allied with Russia. Britain also sought an alliance with France after realizing it was friendless following the Second Boer War in South Africa between 1899 and 1902. Russia also allied itself with Serbia in the Balkan region. Due to Russia’s large population, Germany and Austria-Hungary saw it as a potential threat and decided to form an alliance ( World War I , n.d.). Thus, two antagonistic groups were formed; Triple Entente comprising France, Russia, and Britain, while Triple Alliance consisted of Austria-Hungary, Germany, and Italy.

At the same time, the Ottoman Empire was disintegrating with different ethnic groups seeking independence. Rising nationalism led to various wars in the Balkan region, with the Second Balkan War of 1912-1913 promoting Serbia to increase its size ( World War I , n.d.). Austria-Hungary had equally gained territory from the Ottoman Empire, including Bosnia Herzegovina, inhabited mainly by South Slavic people. Serbia wanted to unite all the Serbs in the Balkan region, but Austria-Hungary was not ready to surrender Bosnia Herzegovina. The Serbs in Austria-Hungary were also pushing to break away and join Serbia.

At the height of nationalism, one young Serbian nationalist, Gavrilo Princip, shot dead Austria-Hungarian heir Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophia while visiting Bosnia. The tension between Serbia and her allies and Austria-Hungary and her friends heightened ( World War I , n.d.). Austria-Hungary gave Serbia a ten-point ultimatum, which Serbia honored only nine points. Russia promised Serbia support in case Austria-Hungary, which Germany had pledged reinforcement, attacked. On July 14, 1914, World War One officially started and continued for the next four years before ending in 1918.

Overall, the First World War started due to various factors. However, historians agree that among the long-term causes were imperialism and the formation of alliances. Triple Entente became the Allied Powers while the Triple alliance was Central Powers during the war. However, the most immediate causes of the war were the killing of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife. Moreover, Serbia’s failure to honor Austria-Hungary’s ten-point ultimatum escalated the conflict.

World War I . (n.d.). HistoryNet. Web.

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Home — Essay Samples — History — Imperialism — Main Causes of World War 1: Discussion

Main Causes of World War 1: Discussion

• Categories: Imperialism Nationalism

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Updated: 16 November, 2023

Words: 645 | Page: 1 | 4 min read

The essay explores the causes of World War 1, which took place from 1914 to 1918. It begins with a brief overview of the war's timeline and the major countries involved, including the United Kingdom, France, Russia, Italy, Romania, Japan, the United States of America, Germany, Austria, Hungary, Bulgaria, and the Ottoman Empire. The essay then delves into the four main causes of the war: Militarism, Nationalism, Imperialism, and Alliances.

Militarism is discussed as the policy of maintaining a strong military force and a readiness to use it aggressively for defense. The significant arms buildup and military spending by various countries, including Germany, are highlighted as contributing factors to the outbreak of the war.

Nationalism is described as the strong attachment to one's own nation and culture. It is explained how nationalism led to conflicts, including the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, which triggered Austria's desire for revenge.

Imperialism, the expansion of a nation's power by dominating other countries, is presented as a factor due to the competition among European powers over control of African resources and territories.

Lastly, the essay discusses the role of Alliances, where countries formed partnerships to defend each other, often resulting in a domino effect of declarations of war.

Table of contents

• Causes of World War 1

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Causes o f world war 1, nationalism and imperialism.

A Good Hook Examples for WWI Essay

• A Glimpse into the Trenches: Step back in time and experience the chilling reality of life in the trenches of World War I. In this essay, we’ll immerse ourselves in the harrowing tales of soldiers who faced the horrors of the Great War.
• The War to End All Wars: Explore the monumental impact of World War I on global history. In this essay, we’ll dissect the events that led to the war, the key players, and the lasting consequences that continue to shape our world today.
• The Poetry of Conflict: World War I inspired a generation of poets to capture the raw emotions of battle. Join us as we analyze the powerful verses and poignant imagery that emerged from the trenches.
• Lessons from the Great War: As we commemorate the centennial of World War I, it’s crucial to reflect on the lessons learned from this catastrophic conflict. This essay delves into the war’s impact on diplomacy, technology, and the human spirit.
• Unsung Heroes of WWI: Beyond the famous generals and political leaders, there were countless unsung heroes in the Great War. In this essay, we’ll shine a light on the remarkable stories of bravery and sacrifice from the trenches to the home front.
• Strachan, H. (2014). The First World War: To Arms. Oxford University Press.
• MacMillan, M. (2013). The War That Ended Peace: The Road to 1914. Random House.
• Fay, S. B. (1928). The Origins of the World War (Vol. 1). The Macmillan Company.
• Gildea, R. (2003). Children of the Revolution: The French, 1799-1914. Harvard University Press.
• Kennedy, P. M. (1980). The Rise of the Anglo-German Antagonism, 1860-1914. Allen & Unwin.

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Dr Stuart Parkinson, SGR, examines how technological innovation contributed to one of the most devastating wars in human history – and asks what lessons we should take from this.

Article from SGR Newsletter no.44; online publication: 5 April 2016  

Download pdf of article  

2016 is the centenary of two of the bloodiest battles of World War I: the Somme and Verdun. And WWI itself is one of the most destructive wars in human history. As an example of the carnage, the total death toll of the war has been estimated at over 15 million people between July 1914 and November 1918 – an average of about 3.5m per year. Only the Russian Civil War and World War II had higher annual death rates. [1] [2] The centenary is therefore an important opportunity to reflect on a conflict in which rapid developments in technology led to a huge increase in the devastation that could be caused by war.

In this article, I examine which technological developments led to the most casualties and what lessons we can draw about science, technology and the military today.  

Harnessing the Industrial Revolution for war

The late 18th and 19th centuries saw a rapid development in technology which we now, of course, refer to as the Industrial Revolution. Starting in Europe, major developments transformed a wide range of industries. Growing exploitation of minerals like coal and iron were especially important, as was the advent of the steam engine – especially in ships and trains.

It was not long before the military started harnessing some of these inventions. Mass production in factories churned out not only large numbers of standardised guns and bullets, but also boots, uniforms and tents. [3] The guns were more reliable and hence more accurate. A bullet was 30 times more likely to strike its target. Developments in transport were also utilised, with steel becoming standard in battleships and trains starting to be used to quickly ferry large numbers of troops to war zones. Advances in chemistry led to new high explosives.

The first wars in which these new military technologies were used on a large scale included the Crimean War (1854-56) and the American Civil War (1861-65). Both of these provided a taster for the carnage of WWI, being characterised by trench warfare in which frontal assaults against well-defended positions led to massacres of infantry soldiers.  

Pre-1914 arms races

In the years running up to the outbreak of WWI, there were several key developments in military technologies that would lead to high casualties during the war itself.

Arguably the most important were new high explosives. Gunpowder had been the explosive of choice in war for around 500 years, but new developments in organic chemistry by Alfred Nobel and others led to new materials, initially used in mining. Further work in the late 19th century especially in Prussia/Germany, Britain and France refined the materials for use in hand-guns and artillery. Most successful were Poudre B and Cordite MD which burnt in such a way as to provide the required directed pressure needed to propel a projectile, without blowing up the weapon. [4]

Developments in gun manufacture were also crucial. Muskets were being replaced by rifles, which were more accurate. Machine guns were also brought onto the scene, first invented in the USA. By 1914, the most widely used machine gun was the British Maxim, capable of firing a shocking 666 rounds per minute. [5]

New artillery was also developed to use the new explosives. By the outbreak of WWI, a single shell weighing one tonne could be propelled more than 30 kilometres. However, smaller and more mobile guns were preferred as these could accurately fire a shell every three seconds. [6]

The development of weapons using poisonous gases was limited by the Hague peace conference of 1899. However, this only limited the development of the delivery systems rather than the gases themselves, in which Germany, Britain and France all had active research programmes. [7]

The development of the submarine and the torpedo would also prove to be crucial. Work in France and the USA led to the first successful military submarines, with Britain, Germany and Italy quickly commissioning their own. At the start of the 20th century, there were about 30 military submarines. This number would rapidly grow. The main weapon of the submarine immediately became the torpedo, invented in Britain. An early demonstration of the effectiveness of this weapon was in a Japanese attack on the Russian fleet in 1904. It was then rapidly deployed by all the major powers. [8]

The other major development in military technology that occurred in the years running up to 1914 was the steam-driven battleship. The first was the Dreadnought , launched by the British in 1906. Heavily armed and fast, it helped to cement Britain’s naval dominance. However, other naval powers, especially Germany, developed their own more powerful battleships during a rapid naval arms race in the pre-war years. [9]

Helping to fuel these arms races were not just competition between national militaries and technological innovation, but also international commerce. Major private corporations such as Vickers and Armstrong in the UK and Krupp in Germany made huge profits from arms sales, including major contracts with governments which would later become the ‘enemy’. [10]  

Key technological developments during the war

After WWI broke out, in summer 1914, the pressure rapidly grew for the warring nations and their scientists and engineers to try to create ‘military advantage’ through innovation. The main areas were diverse, including trench construction, artillery and its targeting, poisonous gases, submarines, tanks and planes.

In terms of artillery, perhaps the most important development during the war was the scaling up of production of the heavy guns which had begun to be deployed by militaries before 1914. Many thousands of these weapons, such as the British 18 Pounder and the French 75mm, were produced. [11] Also important was the development of improved targeting – such as ‘sound-ranging’. These developments led to artillery use on an unprecedented scale. For example, during the Meuse-Argonne campaign – part of the final Allied advance in 1918 – US forces were firing an incredible 40,000 tonnes of shells each day . [12]

Mass production also led to the machine gun being a widely used and devastating weapon, especially in defending trenches. For example, the British favoured the Lewis gun whose numbers increased nine-fold between 1915 and 1918. [13]

German research resulted in the first use of lethal gas in the war – in this case, chlorine – in April 1915. [14] Further development work led to Germany deploying phosgene and mustard gas later in the war. Britain’s first use of lethal gas was in September 1915, although it never used it on the scale that Germany did. However, poisonous gases proved to have limited military value – due to their dependence on weather conditions and their countering through, for example, gas masks. Gases also proved to be significantly less lethal than more conventional weapons. [15]

There was rapid development of military aircraft during WWI, although their role in the conflict remained largely marginal. [16] Planes and airships were adapted to drop bombs, but their main role was reconnaissance, especially spotting the location of enemy artillery.

Submarine development also proceeded quickly during WWI. Germany, in particular, favoured this sort of weapons system, given British superiority in surface warships. By the war’s end they had built 390 ‘U-boats’, and used them to devastating effect, especially from early 1917 onwards when they resorted to ‘unrestricted’ submarine warfare to try to cut off Britain’s maritime supply routes. About four million tonnes of shipping – much of it crewed by civilians – was sunk in little over a year. [17]

In military terms, arguably the most decisive new technology of the war was the tank. First deployed by Britain in 1916 with the aim of overrunning trenches defended by barbed wire and machine guns, it did not initially prove effective. However, further innovation and mass production led to Britain and France each deploying several hundred from the summer of 1918. They proved critical in driving back German forces. [18]  

Which weapons were the biggest killers?

Estimating casualty rates in war is a notoriously difficult exercise, especially when analysing data from a century ago. Nevertheless, World War I historians and other researchers have uncovered a range of information which allows some assessment to be made of the most lethal technologies.

Overall, based on a range of sources, researcher Matthew White has estimated that approximately 8.5 million military personnel and around 6.5m civilians died in World War I. [19] Wikipedia researchers have provided comparable estimates. [20]

Within the military totals, the overwhelming majority of deaths (and injuries) were borne by armies, with naval deaths being only a few percent of the total. [21] Of land-based deaths, the evidence points to artillery being by far the leading cause, followed by machine guns. For example, historians Stephen Bull, [22] Gary Sheffield, [23] and Stephane Audoin-Rouzeau [24] quote a range of official figures that indicate between 50% and 85% of casualties on the battlefield were due to artillery fire.

Civilian deaths – which are much less certain – were overwhelmingly caused by malnutrition and disease, as a result of shortages due to the effect of battlefields, blockades and damage to infrastructure caused by the war. Hence, no single weapons system can be identified as the cause in those cases. Nevertheless, artillery and machine gun fire still resulted in large numbers of civilian casualties.

Drawing on sources already quoted, I estimate the following overall numbers of deaths due to different weapons systems. I must emphasise these have high levels of uncertainty.

• Artillery: 6m (5m military and 1m civilian)
• Machines guns: 3m (2m military and 1m civilian)
• Submarines; rifles: 0.5m each
• Tanks; chemical weapons; warships; planes: 0.1m each

A further 5m civilians are thought to have died due to malnutrition and disease.  

Some lessons

Lessons from the carnage of the World War I continue to be hotly debated, but I want to offer some especially related to science and technology.

Historian John Keegan points out that there was rapid technological development in weapons systems in the years before WWI, in contrast to that in communications. [25] As such, the means to wage war on an unprecedented scale was readily at hand when the international political crisis struck in summer 1914, whereas technologies which political leaders could use to clarify and defuse the situation (e.g. high quality person-to-person phones) were not.

Today, the rapid pace of development in communications technologies is outpacing much in the military field – indicating that perhaps some lessons have been learned about the importance of communication in helping different peoples understand and trust one another. However, militaries are harnessing some of those communications technologies to help revolutionise warfare, an obvious example being the remote piloting of ‘drones’. New international arms controls are urgently needed in this area.

This brings me to another key lesson. 100 years on from the Battle of the Somme, artillery is still being used to devastating effect in many parts of the world – with the carnage of the Syrian war being an obvious example. Campaigners are attempting to get their use restricted under existing international disarmament treaties, but governments are currently showing little interest. [26]

A further lesson concerns the international arms trade. A lack of controls in the years before WWI allowed private corporations to profit from arming both sides. While a new international Arms Trade Treaty was agreed in 2013, its currently weak provisions still allow a major trade which fuels war and repression across the world. [27]

The overarching conclusion is that allowing militaries to play a significant role in scientific research and technological development was a major driver of world war 100 years ago, and it still creates major dangers today. We need to prioritise using science and technology to support and strengthen disarmament processes across the world – that would be the best way of commemorating the fallen from the century past.  

Dr Stuart Parkinson is Executive Director of Scientists for Global Responsibility, and has written widely on the links between science, technology and militarism.

Thanks to Daniel Cahn for valuable help with research for this article.  

[1] Figures and calculations based on data from: White M (2011). Atrocitology. Canongate, London. Death rate of World War II (1939-45): approx 6.5m/y; Russian Civil War (1918-20): approx 4m/y.

[2] See also figures in: Wikipedia (2015). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_I_casualties

[3] p295 of: White (2011) – as note 1.

[4] Chap. 14 of: Williams T (1999). A history of invention: from stone axes to silicon chips. TimeWarner books.

[5] As note 4.

[6] As note 4.

[7] Bull S (2014). Trench: A History of Trench Warfare on the Western Front. Osprey Publishing.

[8] As note 4.

[9] As note 4.

[10] On the Record/ Campaign Against Arms Trade (2014). Arming All Sides. http://armingallsides.on-the-record.org.uk/

[11] History Learning Site (undated). http://www.historylearningsite.co.uk/artillery_and_world_war_one.htm

[12] McKenny J (2007). The Organizational History of Field Artillery: 1775-2003. US Government Printing Office.

[13] Sheffield G (ed.) (2007). War on the Western Front. Osprey Publishing.

[14] As note 7.

[15] As note 7.

[16] As note 4.

[17] p.361 of: Keegan J (1998). The First World War. Random House.

[18] As note 4.

[19] As note 1.

[20] As note 2.

[21] As note 2.

[22] As note 7.

[23] As note 13.

[24] Audoin-Rouzeau S (2012). Combat. Pp.173-187 in: Horne J (2012). A Companion to World War I. Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

[25] As note 17.

[26] Article 36 (2011). http://www.article36.org/explosive-weapons/introduction-explosive-weapo…

[27] War Resisters International (2013). http://www.wri-irg.org/node/21654/

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