Western Front line
Nieuport to the Swiss border -- the English-language default map.
Trench maps of Ypres and the Somme are the visual cliche. A honest atlas also shows the Eastern Front's vastness and the Ottoman theatres.
War art (Nash, Nevinson) and aerial photography created a new way of seeing landscape as damage.
Maps
Eastern Front 1914-17
A war of movement across Poland, Galicia and the Baltics.
Ottoman theatres
Gallipoli, Caucasus, Sinai, Mesopotamia.
Africa and the Pacific
German colonies taken by Allied and Japanese forces -- a world war in fact.
1919-23 new borders
Poland, the Baltics, Yugoslavia, Turkey -- the peace as a map, not a feeling.
Portrayals
All Quiet on the Western Front
Remarque's novel and its films: the enlisted anti-hero view.
Oh! What a Lovely War / Blackadder
British satire as a second canon beside the poets.
Gallipoli (1981)
Australian national story of waste and mateship.
1917 (2019)
A single-take Western Front for a century without veterans.
War poetry anthologies
Owen and Sassoon as the school syllabus, for better and narrower.
Battlefield tourism
Coach tours of the Somme as a ritual of citizenship in Britain and the dominions.
Rituals
Armistice Day / Remembrance Sunday
The two-minute silence, invented for this war, now covers later wars including Korea.
Anzac Day
25 April dawn services in Australia and New Zealand, born at Gallipoli.
Menin Gate Last Post
Nightly bugle at Ypres -- a local ritual that became an Allied one.
Sayings
Every English-speaking town with a stone list of names is a node in this atlas.
Gallipoli dawn services show how a defeat became a national founding story in Australia and New Zealand.