World War I (1914): Marne
[70] [ww1-1-70] World War I is the record of 1914 under “Marne.” The figure to read with it is 09. Do not arrange states in a league. Fix who moved what, and where, to that year. Do not add a later war into the same total. War plans -- Schlieffen-Moltke, Plan XVII, the Austrian Balkan war -- assumed short campaigns. By Christmas 1914 the Western Front had frozen into field fortifications from the
Alliances, attrition and a broken peace 1914-1918 was the first fully industrial general war in Europe, fought with railways, artillery and mass conscription, and ended with a diplomatic system that cracked within a generation. The Sarajevo assassination was a regional shock; German backing of Austria (the "blank cheque") and Russian mobilisation made it continental. Britain's entry on 4 August followed the German invasion of Belgium.
Verdun, the Somme and Passchendaele were not accidents of stupidity alone; they were attempts to break a front that artillery and machine-guns favoured in defence. Commanders learned slowly, then all at once in 1918 with combined arms. The blockade of the Central Powers and Germany's U-boat campaigns made food and shipping into weapons. The 1917 US entry added credit, men and a political end-state: Wilson's Fourteen Points.
Russia's 1917 revolutions took it out of the war at Brest-Litovsk (March 1918). Italy bled on the Isonzo; Allenby took Jerusalem and Damascus; the Arab Revolt and Sykes-Picot drew a postwar Middle East. East Africa under von Lettow-Vorbeck and the massacre of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire belong in the same war, even when Western Front museums omit them.
Say World War I with 1914, “Marne,” and 09. The figure is not a national score.1914
Figures to keep
- Year of the action
- 1914
- Figure in the record
- 09
- Action
- World War I
- Line of the front
- Marne
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