Industrialized Europe viewed itself as the center of the world—economically, socially, culturally, and militarily. European statesmen recognized the use of power for limited purposes, but could not comprehend the travesty of a global conflict. War, when fought, would be swiftly concluded. The faith in limited warfare made statesmen more willing to engage in diplomatic brinkmanship.

In 1914 Europe was divided into two alliance systems. The Triple Entente of Britain, France, and Russia faced the Triple Alliance of Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Italy. Smaller nations were allied with one or another of the blocs. The alliance systems included irrevocable sets of circumstances leading all the participants into war. Weaker nations could act in the full knowledge that their actions had to be supported by more powerful allies.

Military considerations affected all diplomatic decisions. German war preparations were embodied in the Schlieffen Plan, a grand strategy that committed all German forces to the western front against France rather than splitting German armies to face both France and Russia. General Schlieffen believed that the more primitive Russian transportation system would not allow the eastern enemies to mobilize before France could be defeated. Russia, too, considered the problems of mobilization. The answer of Russian generals was to mobilize along the entire front with Germany and Austria-Hungary before the declaration of war. Thus mobilization led inevitably to war. The French grand strategy, Plan XVII, was designed to attack Germany immediately in case of the outbreak of war. Unfortunately, the plan did not account for a German attack through neutral Belgium. In all cases, the need for speed in mobilization limited diplomatic responses to potential conflict.

The inexorable path to war was begun in the Austrian province of Bosnia, recently annexed in the Balkans. A Slavic nationalist, Gavrilo Princip assassinated the designated heir to the Austrian throne, Archduke Franz Ferdinand. Neither the event nor the participants seemed important at the time, but the event involved the sensitive issue of control of the Balkan Peninsula. Russia and Austria-Hungary were permanent rivals for dominance in the region. The assassination served as a pretext for Austria-Hungary to declare war on the independent Slavic state of Serbia, an ally of Russia. As Austria-Hungary launched an invasion, the Russians mobilized along their entire front. Germany declared war in response to Russian mobilization on the eastern front and simultaneously declared war on France as the Schlieffen Plan required. Britain remained temporarily aloof, then joined the other members of the Triple Entente. An imperial incident in the Balkans dragged all the major powers of Europe into war.

The war Europe got was not what had been expected. It could neither be limited in scope nor duration. The countries of the Triple Entente joined by Italy and Japan faced the Central Powers of Germany and Austria-Hungary joined by the Ottoman Empire.

Much of nineteenth-century warfare had been predicated on speed and maneuverability, but the First World War on the western front almost immediately was limited to the trenches that ran from the English Channel to the Swiss border. Machine guns, poison gas, and heavy artillery made short work of cavalry and massive frontal assaults by the infantry. As traditional methods of warfare failed, leaders turned to new technology to break the deadlock—tanks, poison gas, flame throwers, barbed wire, and submarines. All improved killing efficiency, but none proved decisive in ending the war of the trenches.

The Schlieffen Plan had been dedicated to the principle that France could be swiftly eliminated. In that sense, the plan failed. German armies swept through Belgium but progressed more slowly than anticipated. Some German forces were siphoned off to the eastern front, in contradiction to Schlieffen’s original strategy. At the critical moment when the Germans prepared to assault Paris, the German lines were weakened. Counterattacks by British and French forces halted the German advance at the Marne River. Trench lines established along the Marne to Ypres in Belgium remained little changed until the end of the war. With the failure of the Schlieffen Plan, Germany was committed to a two-front war.

The war on the eastern front was not limited to trench warfare because of the tremendous length of the lines dividing the Central Powers from Russia. Initially the Russians were able to take advantage of German strategy to advance into eastern Prussia, but the Germans swiftly met the threat. In 1914 the Germans won two devastating victories over Russian forces at the Tannenberg Forest and the Masurian Lakes. Thereafter the Russian armies enjoyed some success on the southern front against Austria-Hungary, but were constantly pressed back by the Germans. The inadequacy of the Russian transportation network made any military strategy requiring rapid movement of men and machines implausible. As the Russian armies suffered incredible losses (perhaps two million prisoners and casualties), it ceased to be a major force in the war effort.

War on the western front from the Battle of the Marne until 1917 consisted of a series of suicidal mass offensives, none of which succeeded in breaking the deadly cycle of trench warfare. The Germans launched the first offensive at Verdun. After ten months, the French lines held at a cost of over one million casualties to German and French forces. Verdun failed to convince the general staffs of the folly of mass frontal assault. The British attacked on the Somme, the French in the Champagne region, and the British again at Passchendaele.

Given the stalemate on the western front, the Allies attempted to open new fronts. Italy joined the war against Germany and Austria-Hungary in 1915, but failed to make much of an impact on the southern front in the Tyrol. Serbia was eliminated as an ally in the same year. The Allies attempted to open several fronts against the Ottoman Empire. The Gallipoli campaign in the Dardanelles was an unmitigated military disaster that ruined the early career of Winston Churchill, the administrator who proposed the strategy. British forces and their Arab allies were more successful in Egypt and Mesopotamia. Baghdad was captured in 1917. War on the seas was surprisingly indecisive. The British and German navies engaged in only one major battle, Jutland. German naval efforts after 1916 were limited to submarine warfare. Unrestricted use of submarines to assault seaborne commerce, even the ships of neutral nations, provoked international outrage. The British managed to limit the effectiveness of the German submarines through use of convoys, mines, and depth charges.

The First World War required the mobilization of entire national populations to support the war effort. The war imposed constitutional change, as governments controlled every aspect of economic life. The ability to maintain industrial production eventually decided the war’s outcome.

As the war effort utilized most of the available men in the armed forces, women became increasingly responsible for industrial production. In all of the Allied countries, women became a significant factor in the production of weapons, food, and public services. Women even took over clerical positions in the military. After an early experiment with uncontrolled economies, all nations rapidly intervened to control the economy. In Germany, Walther Rathenau created government monopolies in sensitive industries. In Britain, production of munitions and weapons was under the supervision of a new administrative division, the Ministry of Munitions under Lloyd George. Governments were forced to divert food supplies to the armies and introduced food rationing at home. Even with rationing, the ravages of war produced food shortages in most Continental countries.

Labor unrest and political opposition grew as the war continued without promise of victory. All countries experienced growing peace movements, especially among socialists. Governments responded by becoming more repressive. Censorship, emergency powers, and military rule became more common—even in previously liberal governments such as Britain’s. Warring countries attempted to sponsor insurrection in the territories of their enemies. The Germans supported the Irish Easter Rebellion in 1916 against Britain. The Germans exported revolution to Russia by sending Lenin back to his home country in 1917. The British responded by supporting Zionism and fostering unrest among Jewish populations of the Central Powers. The British government also actively cooperated with Arab independence movements in the Ottoman Empire.

After three years of stalemate, there was a time of crisis for all combatants. Without dramatic victories and facing decreasing support on the home front, all nations looked for relief. In 1917 the course of the war was changed by Russian revolution and the entrance of the United States into the war.

Russia was in the midst of an industrial revolution at the time of the outbreak of the First World War. As in all countries, industrialization caused social and economic dislocations. In 1905 Russian troops fired on labor demonstrators in Petrograd and initiated a revolution. After some reforms—the introduction of a national parliament, the Duma—the government returned to repressive measures to quell riots of laborers and peasants. Shut out of the government, workers united in independent labor organizations, the soviets. At the outset of the war, labor unrest resulted in numerous strikes. In order to fight the war, the tsar pressed industrial production at the expense of the agricultural economy. At the same time, he left the domestic government in the hands of his wife and a strange mystic, Rasputin. In March 1917 the workers’ groups rebelled again. This time the tsar abdicated, leaving a vacuum of authority in Russia.

Power was divided between the workers’ soviets, scattered throughout the cities of Russia, and the Duma, generally controlled by the small class of Russian bourgeoisie. The two groups could not cooperate. The situation was complicated by general rebellion among the peasants, who accepted the revolution and demanded grants of land. Disruption in the countryside led to aggravation of food shortages. Revolution also affected the Russian army. Constant defeats and horrendous losses sapped the will of the military. Many deserted or refused to fight, despite the decision of the Provisional Government to carry on the war. The overthrow of the tsar paved the way for the return of the exiled intelligentsia. Most influential of the returning intellectuals were the Marxist Social Democrats. The more moderate faction of the group, the Mensheviks, urged revisionism and cooperation with the Provisional Government and the Duma. The radicals, Lenin’s Bolsheviks, demanded further revolution through the soviets. Lenin demanded an immediate end to the war, redistribution of land, and expansion of the revolution to the workers of western Europe. In July 1917 national demonstrations in favor of the soviets and against the Provisional Government were met with repression. As a partial sop to the demonstrators, Aleksandr Kerenski, a moderate socialist, was named to head the Provisional Government.

In November 1917 the Red Guards, the armed militia of the Petrograd soviet, seized the Russian capital. Members of the Provisional Government were either arrested or permitted to escape. All of the workers’ soviets endorsed the overthrow and the leadership of Lenin.

Lenin immediately took Russia out of the war. In the treaty of Brest-Litovsk, the Russian leader accepted huge territorial losses to gain a peace settlement. So humiliating was the treaty that some Russian military officers refused to accept it. They launched a civil war against the soviet government. In order to fight the civil war, Lenin was also forced to narrow the base of government and institute a repressive dictatorship based on the authority of the secret police.

A friendly neutral throughout most of the war, the U.S. was drawn into the conflict as a result of German diplomatic blunders. Unrestricted submarine warfare, initiated in 1917, threatened American trade with Europe. The Germans also crudely attempted to lure the Mexican government into an alliance by offering the return of lands in the American Southwest. When the German plot became public in the Zimmermann telegram, President Woodrow Wilson sought and received a declaration of war. The United States’ entry into the war shifted the manpower and war-materiel balance in favor of the Allies. Germany launched one last, desperate offensive in 1918. Despite early success, the German attack failed to reach Paris. The weight of Allied arms, reinforced by the arrival of increasing numbers of Americans, forced the Germans to withdraw. Rather than allow the war to be taken to German soil, the German general staff signed an armistice on 11 November 1918.

The peace negotiations were designed to restore stability to all of Europe. Outside the negotiations, but casting a shadow over the deliberations, was revolutionary Russia.

The peace settlement was a compromise. President Woodrow Wilson of the United States represented the prewar, liberal view of international relations. His proposals were embodied in the Fourteen Points, which included open diplomacy instead of secret alliances, a return to freedom of trade and commerce, reduction of national armaments, and an international organization of states to oversee the peace. The latter provision was ironically accepted in Europe where the League of Nations became a reality, but rejected by the Congress of the United States who refused to become a member of the new organization. Georges Clemenceau of France represented the paranoid, war-weary view of the other Allies. He demanded the creation of buffer states to surround Germany, much as France was surrounded after the Napoleonic Wars. While few changes were made in the national boundaries of western Europe, the map of eastern Europe was totally redrawn.

While few changes were made in the national boundaries of western Europe, the map of eastern Europe was totally redrawn. In the Middle East the British issued the Balfour declaration giving support for a Jewish homeland in Palestine while promising independence to the Arabic speaking people. In the end the Middle East was carved up and divided among the European powers. New states were carved out in Finland, Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Austria, Hungary, and Yugoslavia. Finally, the Treaty of Versailles introduced the War Guilt Clause, a statement fixing blame for the war on Germany and requiring the payment of reparations to the victorious Allies. Germany was economically crippled. The peace settlement was weakened by the exclusion of Russia from the negotiating table, by the refusal of the United States Congress to endorse all aspects of the treaty, and by a growing desire for isolation in Great Britain.