World War I

The First World War was fought from 1914 to 1918 between the Allies, led by France, Britain and Russia and joined in 1917 by the United States, and the Central Powers, Germany, Austria-Hungary, the Ottoman Empire and Bulgaria. It began when a Bosnian Serb student, Gavrilo Princip, shot the heir to the Austrian throne, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, in Sarajevo on June 28, 1914. Austria blamed Serbia and declared war on it a month later; Russia mobilised to protect Serbia, Germany to protect Austria, France was bound to Russia and Britain to Belgium, and within a week the alliances built up over forty years had pulled all the great powers in. Everyone expected a short war.

It was not. Germany's drive on Paris was stopped at the Marne in September 1914, and from the Channel to Switzerland the armies dug in. For four years the Western Front barely moved while the new weapons, machine guns, heavy artillery, barbed wire, poison gas, aircraft and, from September 1916, tanks, killed men on a scale no one had imagined. At Verdun in 1916 the French and Germans lost some 700,000 between them; on the first day of the Somme, July 1, 1916, the British Army suffered 57,000 casualties, the worst day in its history. The war spread to the Eastern Front, to Italy, to Gallipoli, where Australian and New Zealand troops landed on April 25, 1915, to the Middle East, to Africa and to the sea, where German submarines sank ships without warning.

The submarines brought in the United States in April 1917. The same year Russia collapsed into revolution, and the Bolsheviks took it out of the war. Germany threw everything into a last offensive in the spring of 1918, came within reach of Paris, and was then driven back by the Allies through the summer and autumn as fresh American divisions arrived. Its allies gave way one by one, revolution broke out in its ports and cities, the Kaiser fled to Holland, and at 11 o'clock on the morning of November 11, 1918, the guns stopped under an armistice signed in a railway carriage in the forest of Compiègne.

Between 15 and 22 million people had died, soldiers and civilians, and the influenza that followed the armies home killed tens of millions more. Four empires were gone: the German, the Austro-Hungarian, the Russian and the Ottoman. The Treaty of Versailles of June 1919 redrew the map of Europe and the Middle East, loaded Germany with blame and reparations, and created the League of Nations. The war gave the world the Soviet Union, the modern Middle East, the vote for women in Britain and America, the poppy and the two-minute silence; it broke the old order of kings, and its unfinished business brought the Second World War twenty years later.