The 1914-1918 industrial war that broke empires, enfranchised mass mourning, and left a peace that did not hold.
Educational history. Casualty figures are documented ranges. This is not operational advice, a ranking of nations, or a how-to for weapons or coups.
The First World War began with Austria-Hungary's declaration of war on Serbia on 28 July 1914, after the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo on 28 June. Within a week the alliance system had pulled in Germany, Russia, France and Britain; the Ottoman Empire and later Italy, Bulgaria and the United States widened the map.
About 15-22 million people died, scholarly range, including roughly 9-11 million military dead and a large civilian toll from blockade, massacre and the 1918 influenza that overlapped the last campaigns. The Western Front's trenches dominate English memory; the Eastern Front, the Alps, Mesopotamia, East Africa and the sea war were equally part of the same industrial conflict.
Four empires -- German, Austro-Hungarian, Ottoman and Russian -- collapsed. The 1919-23 peace settlements created new states and mandates, and also the grievances that Hitler and others later exploited. Poppies, cenotaphs and the two-minute silence remain the Anglophone template for remembering war itself.
Deep introduction
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.
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 Channel to Switzerland.
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.
The 11 November 1918 armistice stopped the shooting in France before Allied armies entered Germany in force -- a fact later twisted by the "stab in the back" myth. Versailles (1919), Saint-Germain, Neuilly, Trianon and Sevres/Lausanne dismantled empires.
League of Nations mandates in the Middle East and the Pacific, and the US Senate's rejection of the League, left an incomplete security system. The Second World War is not a sequel by fate, but it is unintelligible without this peace.
Dated history of the 1914-1918 war: July Crisis, fronts, 1918 decision and the Versailles system.
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02Mass conscript armies, the Grand Fleet and war economies of 1914-1918.
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03Western Front, other fronts and the 1918 offensives -- historical sequence, not instruction.
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04About 15-22 million dead, scholarly range, plus blockade, influenza and ruined regions.
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05Commanders, premiers and the poets who still frame English memory.
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06Collapsed empires, mandates, memorial culture and the road toward 1939.
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07Trenches, cenotaphs, Gallipoli and the poppy as public history.
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