world war i enduring issues essay

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World War I

By: History.com Editors

Updated: May 10, 2024 | Original: October 29, 2009

World War I, also known as the Great War, started in 1914 after the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria. His murder catapulted into a war across Europe that lasted until 1918. During the four-year conflict, Germany, Austria-Hungary, Bulgaria and the Ottoman Empire (the Central Powers) fought against Great Britain, France, Russia, Italy, Romania, Canada, Japan and the United States (the Allied Powers). Thanks to new military technologies and the horrors of trench warfare, World War I saw unprecedented levels of carnage and destruction. By the time the war was over and the Allied Powers had won, more than 16 million people—soldiers and civilians alike—were dead.

Archduke Franz Ferdinand

Tensions had been brewing throughout Europe—especially in the troubled Balkan region of southeast Europe—for years before World War I actually broke out.

A number of alliances involving European powers, the Ottoman Empire , Russia and other parties had existed for years, but political instability in the Balkans (particularly Bosnia, Serbia and Herzegovina) threatened to destroy these agreements.

The spark that ignited World War I was struck in Sarajevo, Bosnia, where Archduke Franz Ferdinand —heir to the Austro-Hungarian Empire—was shot to death along with his wife, Sophie, by the Serbian nationalist Gavrilo Princip on June 28, 1914. Princip and other nationalists were struggling to end Austro-Hungarian rule over Bosnia and Herzegovina.

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The assassination of Franz Ferdinand set off a rapidly escalating chain of events: Austria-Hungary , like many countries around the world, blamed the Serbian government for the attack and hoped to use the incident as justification for settling the question of Serbian nationalism once and for all.

Kaiser Wilhelm II

Because mighty Russia supported Serbia, Austria-Hungary waited to declare war until its leaders received assurance from German leader Kaiser Wilhelm II that Germany would support their cause. Austro-Hungarian leaders feared that a Russian intervention would involve Russia’s ally, France, and possibly Great Britain as well.

On July 5, Kaiser Wilhelm secretly pledged his support, giving Austria-Hungary a so-called carte blanche, or “blank check” assurance of Germany’s backing in the case of war. The Dual Monarchy of Austria-Hungary then sent an ultimatum to Serbia, with such harsh terms as to make it almost impossible to accept.

World War I Begins

Convinced that Austria-Hungary was readying for war, the Serbian government ordered the Serbian army to mobilize and appealed to Russia for assistance. On July 28, Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia, and the tenuous peace between Europe’s great powers quickly collapsed.

Within a week, Russia, Belgium, France, Great Britain and Serbia had lined up against Austria-Hungary and Germany, and World War I had begun.

The Western Front

According to an aggressive military strategy known as the Schlieffen Plan (named for its mastermind, German Field Marshal Alfred von Schlieffen ), Germany began fighting World War I on two fronts, invading France through neutral Belgium in the west and confronting Russia in the east.

On August 4, 1914, German troops crossed the border into Belgium. In the first battle of World War I, the Germans assaulted the heavily fortified city of Liege , using the most powerful weapons in their arsenal—enormous siege cannons—to capture the city by August 15. The Germans left death and destruction in their wake as they advanced through Belgium toward France, shooting civilians and executing a Belgian priest they had accused of inciting civilian resistance. 

First Battle of the Marne

In the First Battle of the Marne , fought from September 6-9, 1914, French and British forces confronted the invading German army, which had by then penetrated deep into northeastern France, within 30 miles of Paris. The Allied troops checked the German advance and mounted a successful counterattack, driving the Germans back to the north of the Aisne River.

The defeat meant the end of German plans for a quick victory in France. Both sides dug into trenches , and the Western Front was the setting for a hellish war of attrition that would last more than three years.

Particularly long and costly battles in this campaign were fought at Verdun (February-December 1916) and the Battle of the Somme (July-November 1916). German and French troops suffered close to a million casualties in the Battle of Verdun alone.

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World War I Books and Art

The bloodshed on the battlefields of the Western Front, and the difficulties its soldiers had for years after the fighting had ended, inspired such works of art as “ All Quiet on the Western Front ” by Erich Maria Remarque and “ In Flanders Fields ” by Canadian doctor Lieutenant-Colonel John McCrae . In the latter poem, McCrae writes from the perspective of the fallen soldiers:

Published in 1915, the poem inspired the use of the poppy as a symbol of remembrance.

Visual artists like Otto Dix of Germany and British painters Wyndham Lewis, Paul Nash and David Bomberg used their firsthand experience as soldiers in World War I to create their art, capturing the anguish of trench warfare and exploring the themes of technology, violence and landscapes decimated by war.

The Eastern Front

On the Eastern Front of World War I, Russian forces invaded the German-held regions of East Prussia and Poland but were stopped short by German and Austrian forces at the Battle of Tannenberg in late August 1914.

Despite that victory, Russia’s assault forced Germany to move two corps from the Western Front to the Eastern, contributing to the German loss in the Battle of the Marne.

Combined with the fierce Allied resistance in France, the ability of Russia’s huge war machine to mobilize relatively quickly in the east ensured a longer, more grueling conflict instead of the quick victory Germany had hoped to win under the Schlieffen Plan .

Russian Revolution

From 1914 to 1916, Russia’s army mounted several offensives on World War I’s Eastern Front but was unable to break through German lines.

Defeat on the battlefield, combined with economic instability and the scarcity of food and other essentials, led to mounting discontent among the bulk of Russia’s population, especially the poverty-stricken workers and peasants. This increased hostility was directed toward the imperial regime of Czar Nicholas II and his unpopular German-born wife, Alexandra.

Russia’s simmering instability exploded in the Russian Revolution of 1917, spearheaded by Vladimir Lenin and the Bolsheviks , which ended czarist rule and brought a halt to Russian participation in World War I.

Russia reached an armistice with the Central Powers in early December 1917, freeing German troops to face the remaining Allies on the Western Front.

America Enters World War I

At the outbreak of fighting in 1914, the United States remained on the sidelines of World War I, adopting the policy of neutrality favored by President Woodrow Wilson while continuing to engage in commerce and shipping with European countries on both sides of the conflict.

Neutrality, however, it was increasingly difficult to maintain in the face of Germany’s unchecked submarine aggression against neutral ships, including those carrying passengers. In 1915, Germany declared the waters surrounding the British Isles to be a war zone, and German U-boats sunk several commercial and passenger vessels, including some U.S. ships.

Widespread protest over the sinking by U-boat of the British ocean liner Lusitania —traveling from New York to Liverpool, England with hundreds of American passengers onboard—in May 1915 helped turn the tide of American public opinion against Germany. In February 1917, Congress passed a $250 million arms appropriations bill intended to make the United States ready for war.

Germany sunk four more U.S. merchant ships the following month, and on April 2 Woodrow Wilson appeared before Congress and called for a declaration of war against Germany.

Gallipoli Campaign

With World War I having effectively settled into a stalemate in Europe, the Allies attempted to score a victory against the Ottoman Empire, which entered the conflict on the side of the Central Powers in late 1914.

After a failed attack on the Dardanelles (the strait linking the Sea of Marmara with the Aegean Sea), Allied forces led by Britain launched a large-scale land invasion of the Gallipoli Peninsula in April 1915. The invasion also proved a dismal failure, and in January 1916 Allied forces staged a full retreat from the shores of the peninsula after suffering 250,000 casualties.

Did you know? The young Winston Churchill, then first lord of the British Admiralty, resigned his command after the failed Gallipoli campaign in 1916, accepting a commission with an infantry battalion in France.

British-led forces also combated the Ottoman Turks in Egypt and Mesopotamia , while in northern Italy, Austrian and Italian troops faced off in a series of 12 battles along the Isonzo River, located at the border between the two nations.

Battle of the Isonzo

The First Battle of the Isonzo took place in the late spring of 1915, soon after Italy’s entrance into the war on the Allied side. In the Twelfth Battle of the Isonzo, also known as the Battle of Caporetto (October 1917), German reinforcements helped Austria-Hungary win a decisive victory.

After Caporetto, Italy’s allies jumped in to offer increased assistance. British and French—and later, American—troops arrived in the region, and the Allies began to take back the Italian Front.

World War I at Sea

In the years before World War I, the superiority of Britain’s Royal Navy was unchallenged by any other nation’s fleet, but the Imperial German Navy had made substantial strides in closing the gap between the two naval powers. Germany’s strength on the high seas was also aided by its lethal fleet of U-boat submarines.

After the Battle of Dogger Bank in January 1915, in which the British mounted a surprise attack on German ships in the North Sea, the German navy chose not to confront Britain’s mighty Royal Navy in a major battle for more than a year, preferring to rest the bulk of its naval strategy on its U-boats.

The biggest naval engagement of World War I, the Battle of Jutland (May 1916) left British naval superiority on the North Sea intact, and Germany would make no further attempts to break an Allied naval blockade for the remainder of the war.

World War I Planes

World War I was the first major conflict to harness the power of planes. Though not as impactful as the British Royal Navy or Germany’s U-boats, the use of planes in World War I presaged their later, pivotal role in military conflicts around the globe.

At the dawn of World War I, aviation was a relatively new field; the Wright brothers took their first sustained flight just eleven years before, in 1903. Aircraft were initially used primarily for reconnaissance missions. During the First Battle of the Marne, information passed from pilots allowed the allies to exploit weak spots in the German lines, helping the Allies to push Germany out of France.

The first machine guns were successfully mounted on planes in June of 1912 in the United States, but were imperfect; if timed incorrectly, a bullet could easily destroy the propeller of the plane it came from. The Morane-Saulnier L, a French plane, provided a solution: The propeller was armored with deflector wedges that prevented bullets from hitting it. The Morane-Saulnier Type L was used by the French, the British Royal Flying Corps (part of the Army), the British Royal Navy Air Service and the Imperial Russian Air Service. The British Bristol Type 22 was another popular model used for both reconnaissance work and as a fighter plane.

Dutch inventor Anthony Fokker improved upon the French deflector system in 1915. His “interrupter” synchronized the firing of the guns with the plane’s propeller to avoid collisions. Though his most popular plane during WWI was the single-seat Fokker Eindecker, Fokker created over 40 kinds of airplanes for the Germans.

The Allies debuted the Handley-Page HP O/400, the first two-engine bomber, in 1915. As aerial technology progressed, long-range heavy bombers like Germany’s Gotha G.V. (first introduced in 1917) were used to strike cities like London. Their speed and maneuverability proved to be far deadlier than Germany’s earlier Zeppelin raids.

By the war’s end, the Allies were producing five times more aircraft than the Germans. On April 1, 1918, the British created the Royal Air Force, or RAF, the first air force to be a separate military branch independent from the navy or army. 

Second Battle of the Marne

With Germany able to build up its strength on the Western Front after the armistice with Russia, Allied troops struggled to hold off another German offensive until promised reinforcements from the United States were able to arrive.

On July 15, 1918, German troops launched what would become the last German offensive of the war, attacking French forces (joined by 85,000 American troops as well as some of the British Expeditionary Force) in the Second Battle of the Marne . The Allies successfully pushed back the German offensive and launched their own counteroffensive just three days later.

After suffering massive casualties, Germany was forced to call off a planned offensive further north, in the Flanders region stretching between France and Belgium, which was envisioned as Germany’s best hope of victory.

The Second Battle of the Marne turned the tide of war decisively towards the Allies, who were able to regain much of France and Belgium in the months that followed.

The Harlem Hellfighters and Other All-Black Regiments

By the time World War I began, there were four all-Black regiments in the U.S. military: the 24th and 25th Infantry and the 9th and 10th Cavalry. All four regiments comprised of celebrated soldiers who fought in the Spanish-American War and American-Indian Wars , and served in the American territories. But they were not deployed for overseas combat in World War I. 

Blacks serving alongside white soldiers on the front lines in Europe was inconceivable to the U.S. military. Instead, the first African American troops sent overseas served in segregated labor battalions, restricted to menial roles in the Army and Navy, and shutout of the Marines, entirely. Their duties mostly included unloading ships, transporting materials from train depots, bases and ports, digging trenches, cooking and maintenance, removing barbed wire and inoperable equipment, and burying soldiers.

Facing criticism from the Black community and civil rights organizations for its quotas and treatment of African American soldiers in the war effort, the military formed two Black combat units in 1917, the 92nd and 93rd Divisions . Trained separately and inadequately in the United States, the divisions fared differently in the war. The 92nd faced criticism for their performance in the Meuse-Argonne campaign in September 1918. The 93rd Division, however, had more success. 

With dwindling armies, France asked America for reinforcements, and General John Pershing , commander of the American Expeditionary Forces, sent regiments in the 93 Division to over, since France had experience fighting alongside Black soldiers from their Senegalese French Colonial army. The 93 Division’s 369 regiment, nicknamed the Harlem Hellfighters , fought so gallantly, with a total of 191 days on the front lines, longer than any AEF regiment, that France awarded them the Croix de Guerre for their heroism. More than 350,000 African American soldiers would serve in World War I in various capacities.

Toward Armistice

By the fall of 1918, the Central Powers were unraveling on all fronts.

Despite the Turkish victory at Gallipoli, later defeats by invading forces and an Arab revolt that destroyed the Ottoman economy and devastated its land, and the Turks signed a treaty with the Allies in late October 1918.

Austria-Hungary, dissolving from within due to growing nationalist movements among its diverse population, reached an armistice on November 4. Facing dwindling resources on the battlefield, discontent on the homefront and the surrender of its allies, Germany was finally forced to seek an armistice on November 11, 1918, ending World War I.

Treaty of Versailles

At the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, Allied leaders stated their desire to build a post-war world that would safeguard itself against future conflicts of such a devastating scale.

Some hopeful participants had even begun calling World War I “the War to End All Wars.” But the Treaty of Versailles , signed on June 28, 1919, would not achieve that lofty goal.

Saddled with war guilt, heavy reparations and denied entrance into the League of Nations , Germany felt tricked into signing the treaty, having believed any peace would be a “peace without victory,” as put forward by President Wilson in his famous Fourteen Points speech of January 1918.

As the years passed, hatred of the Versailles treaty and its authors settled into a smoldering resentment in Germany that would, two decades later, be counted among the causes of World War II .

World War I Casualties

World War I took the lives of more than 9 million soldiers; 21 million more were wounded. Civilian casualties numbered close to 10 million. The two nations most affected were Germany and France, each of which sent some 80 percent of their male populations between the ages of 15 and 49 into battle.

The political disruption surrounding World War I also contributed to the fall of four venerable imperial dynasties: Germany, Austria-Hungary, Russia and Turkey.

Legacy of World War I

World War I brought about massive social upheaval, as millions of women entered the workforce to replace men who went to war and those who never came back. The first global war also helped to spread one of the world’s deadliest global pandemics, the Spanish flu epidemic of 1918, which killed an estimated 20 to 50 million people.

World War I has also been referred to as “the first modern war.” Many of the technologies now associated with military conflict—machine guns, tanks , aerial combat and radio communications—were introduced on a massive scale during World War I.

The severe effects that chemical weapons such as mustard gas and phosgene had on soldiers and civilians during World War I galvanized public and military attitudes against their continued use. The Geneva Convention agreements, signed in 1925, restricted the use of chemical and biological agents in warfare and remain in effect today.

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Notes from The Conversation UK

World War I: what we’ve learned from the ‘war to end all wars’

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It would become known as the Great War, or the “war to end all wars”. Four years of bitter conflict from August 1914 to November 1918 which spread to involve more than 80% of the world, causing 37m casualties, military and civilian, and 16m deaths.

For the past four years, we’ve been examining the major issues and events of World War I: from its outbreak in the summer of 1914, through its major battles, such as the Somme in 1916, to its conclusion on November 11, 1918. We’ve asked a large array of academic experts to comment on everything from the geopolitics, tactics and technology to the war’s legacy. Here are some of the things we have learned:

What happens in the Balkans…

All the schoolbooks tell us that it was a young Bosnian serb, Gavril Princip, who assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand to start the clock ticking towards conflict. But most of the great powers, particularly Germany and Austria-Hungary, had been planning for a war in Europe for some time and Princip’s bullet gave them the chance they were looking for.

But if the politicians were gung-ho (aren’t they always?) ordinary folk weren’t so bullish. It took a concerted campaign of jingoism to get the drums beating on the Home Front.

Mud and blood: the trenches

The enduring picture of World War I is of muddy trenches, barbed wire and bomb craters. Lice, trench foot and myriad other diseases (flu, malaria, typhoid) took a heavy toll on troops on both sides. And the poor diet was also hard on their teeth . Nor was this confined to the ranks: the British military commander, General Douglas Haig, developed such excruciating toothache at the Battle of Aisne in the summer of 1914 that a dentist had to be sent for from Paris.

Boredom was also a problem for many soldiers awaiting the next big push. Troops had various ways of relieving this, including their own satirical newspaper , The Wipers Times.

Battles could often last for months and achieve little. Perhaps the most famous, certainly for the British, was the Somme – which lasted 141 days and cost 300,000 lives on both sides. The battle changed the way the British approached the war – from then on, production of tanks and aircraft in particular soared as Allied tacticians sought to break the trench-based deadlock.

War at sea and in the air

It was “total war” which, for the first time, was waged on land, sea and in the air. It has been estimated that 14,000 Allied pilots lost their lives – more than half of them in training – but then the first manned powered flight had taken place just 11 years before the war broke out. Surprisingly, however, aerial combat has remained fairly constant since .

But what of the war at sea? After the Battle of Jutland , which pitched the British Grand Fleet against Imperial Germany’s High Seas Fleet, Britannia largely ruled the waves. Winston Churchill subsequently said that the British sea commander, Admiral Sir John Jellicoe, was the only man on either side “who could have lost the war in an afternoon”. Happily for the British, he didn’t.

Women at war

Women also played an enormous and vital role: whether on the home front growing and cooking the food or working in the factories that powered Britain’s industrial effort, or as nurses, serving in dangerous conditions. Women volunteers were at the front within weeks of the conflict beginning and served with bravery and distinction. It’s generally thought that the social changes wrought by the Great War saw women get the vote in Britain far earlier than they otherwise might have.

1918: peace at last

Sunday November 11, 2018 will be a chance for the world to reflect. To start with, to call it the “war to end all wars” proved tragically optimistic: within a single generation the world was plunged back into an even more destructive conflict, the seeds of which were sown in the harsh peace treaty imposed on Germany and her allies at Versailles.

Asked in the mid-1930s to reflect on the medical advances made during World War I, an unnamed Austrian medic said :

Nobody won the last war but the medical services. The increase in knowledge was the sole determinable gain for mankind in a devastating catastrophe.

But it’s never too late to learn. Anyone who still believes that war is the solution to anything should read the words of the most famous war poet of them all, Wilfred Owen – whose life was cut short and whose talent was extinguished at the desperately young age of 25, just seven days before the guns fell silent:

My subject is War, and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity. Yet these elegies are to this generation in no sense consolatory. They may be to the next. All a poet can do today is warn.

While you are here…

Please listen to our podcast , in which we talk to academic experts about how the Armistice came about, three of the great World War I poets, and what life was like for the brave conscientious objectors who refused to take up arms.

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A War to End All Innocence

By A.O. Scott

• June 20, 2014

“I feel like a soldier on the morning after the Somme.” This line of dialogue, from an episode in the second season of the BBC series “ Call the Midwife ,” caught my ear recently as an especially piquant morsel of period detail. It is uttered by a doctor to a nurse after they have just assisted in a grueling home birth, an experience that is compared to the four-month battle in a muddy stretch of Picardy beginning on July 1, 1916, that was, at the time, the bloodiest episode of combat in human history, generating 60,000 casualties in a single day of fighting on the British side alone. The doctor’s comparison is surely metaphorical overkill, but it also represents a familiar style of wit, a habit of linking the challenges we regularly endure with calamities we can scarcely imagine.

But why choose that particular calamity? “Call the Midwife,” based on a popular series of memoirs by Jennifer Worth, takes place in the late 1950s, not long after a war that, in terms of the sheer scale and extent of global slaughter, far eclipsed its predecessor. It is interesting that for this youngish doctor and nurse, the earlier conflict comes more readily to mind. The Somme is more accessible, and perhaps more immediate, than Dunkirk or D-Day.

The allusion may require a footnote now, but its occurrence in a television program that is acutely sensitive to historical accuracy is a sign of just how deeply, if in some ways obscurely, World War I remains embedded in the popular consciousness. Publicized in its day as “the war to end all wars,” it has instead become the war to which all subsequent wars, and much else in modern life, seem to refer. Words and phrases once specifically associated with the experience of combat on the Western Front are still part of the common language. We barely recognize “in the trenches,” “no man’s land” or “ over the top “ as figures of speech, much less as images that evoke what was once a novel form of organized mass death. And we seldom notice that our collective understanding of what has happened in foxholes, jungles, mountains and deserts far removed in space and time from the sandbags and barbed wire of France and Belgium is filtered through the blood, smoke and misery of those earlier engagements.

One person who did notice the lasting and decisive cultural influence of World War I was Paul Fussell, a literary scholar and World War II infantry veteran whose 1975 book, “ The Great War and Modern Memory ,” remains a tour de force of passionate, learned criticism. Fussell, who died in 2012, combed through novels, memoirs and poems written in the wake of the war and found that they established a pattern that would continue to hold, consciously and not, for much of the 20th century.

Many British soldiers and officers arrived at the front steeped in a literary tradition that colored their perception — a tradition that included not only martial epics and popular adventure novels but also religious and romantic allegories like John Bunyan’s “The Pilgrim’s Progress.” The central character in that 17th-century tale of desperate hardship and ultimate redemption is first seen as “a man clothed in rags” with “a great burden upon his back,” a description that seemed uncannily to prefigure the trench-weary conscript with his tattered uniform and heavy pack.

That soldier, in turn, with some adjustments of outfit and equipment, would march through the subsequent decades, leaving behind a corpus of remarkably consistent firsthand testimony. Whether presented as memoir or fiction, post-1918 war writing returns again and again to the same themes and attitudes. Among them are an emphasis on the tedium and terror of ground combat; the privileging of the ordinary soldier’s perspective over that of officers or strategists; a suspicion of authority and a tendency to mock those who wield it; a strong sense of the unbridgeable existential division between those who fight and the people back home; a taste for absurdity, sarcasm and black humor; and the conclusion that, whatever the outcome or justice of the war as a whole, its legacy for the individual veteran will be cynicism and disillusionment.

Fussell found these traits in the literature of his own war — in “The Naked and the Dead,” “Catch-22” and “Gravity’s Rainbow” — and they saturate the Vietnam narratives that followed the publication of his book. The title of “The Things They Carried,” Tim O’Brien’s cycle of autobiographical stories about life before, during and after combat in Vietnam, carries an echo of “The Pilgrim’s Progress,” and its blend of economical prose, blunt naturalism and surreal terror makes it both a definitive account of its own war and a recapitulation of the Great One.

Like nearly every other male writer in English to have tackled the subject of war, Mr. O’Brien owes a clear debt to Hemingway, who came as close to anyone to striking a template for how it should be dealt with in a famous passage from “A Farewell to Arms”:

“There were many words that you could not stand to hear and finally only the names of places had dignity. Certain numbers were the same way and certain dates and these with the names of the places were all you could say and have them mean anything. Abstract words such as glory, honor, courage, or hallow were obscene beside the concrete names of villages, the numbers of roads, the names of rivers, the numbers of regiments and the dates.”

This tough wisdom — itself curiously abstract, in spite of its insistence on specificity — has remained in effect even as the geography has changed. The imperative to tell what really happened, even to a public or a posterity incapable of fully understanding, has produced a literature full of names and dates. Verdun, Passchendaele, Gallipoli, Guadalcanal, Monte Cassino, Stalingrad, Inchon, Khe Sanh, Kandahar, Fallujah. Nov. 11; June 6; Tet; Sept. 11.

In 1964, 50 years after the war began, Philip Larkin, born in 1922, published a memorial poem called “ MCMXIV .” Larkin’s subject is less the war as such than a faded England of “archaic faces” and bygone habits, an England that ceased to exist sometime between the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo on June 28 and the commencement of full, continent-engulfing hostilities at the beginning of August. The poem tries to freeze the moment when the older world — a world his parents knew intimately but one that lay just beyond the horizon of his own memory — “changed itself to past without a word.”

“Never such innocence again,” Larkin concludes, summarizing what was, then and now, a crucial tenet of the conventional wisdom about the Great War, a notion that informed Hemingway’s rejection of the old, elevated language of honor and glory. Even as he acknowledges the seductive power of the idea of lost innocence, Larkin also suggests that it is complicated, even deceptive. Individuals like the anonymous children and husbands who populate his lines can easily be imagined as innocent. Imperial nation-states that have spent the last few centuries conquering most of the rest of the globe are another story.

This was clear enough to Larkin, whose patriotism rested on the notion that England was the worst place on earth with the possible exception of everywhere else. The first time he uses the phrase “Never such innocence” he qualifies it with “never before or since,” suggesting that the particular Edenic aura that hangs over the prewar months of 1914 may be its own kind of illusion. To imply that Britain (or for that matter any other combatant nation) was somehow more innocent than ever on the eve of catastrophe is to register an aftereffect of the catastrophe itself.

The war was so foul and terrible that it could only have erupted in a landscape of goodness and purity. That, at any rate, is one of the myths it leaves behind. Another, favored at the time by a handful of vanguard intellectuals (notably the Italian Futurists) and adapted by some later historians, was that the war accelerated tendencies already present in modern society: toward mechanized violence, total conflict and the fusion of technology and politics.

Accounts of that summer, especially in France and Britain, frequently emphasize beautiful weather and holiday pleasures. Gabriel Chevalier’s “ Fear ,” a novel of combat published in 1930, opens with “carefree France” in its “summer costumes.” “There wasn’t a cloud in the sky — such an optimistic, bright blue sky.” A lovely example of the interplay of empirical reality and literary embellishment: the meteorological record will attest to the color and clarity of the sky, but only the cruel, corrective irony of hindsight can summon the word “optimistic.”

And then: “In a few short days, civilization was wiped out.” This brutally concise sentence, a few pages into “Fear,” summarizes the loss of innocence that subsequent chapters of first-person narration will elaborate. But those chapters will also make clear the extent to which that “civilization,” so intoxicated by its own rhetoric of national glory and heroic destiny, was the author of its own extinction. The discrepancy between that lofty language and the horrific reality of war opens a chasm in human experience that, in Fussell’s account, has never closed: “I am saying,” he wrote, “that there seems to be one dominating form of modern understanding; that it is essentially ironic; and that it originates largely in the application of mind and memory to the events of the Great War.”

More recent events, and the imaginative response to them might indicate the extent to which minds can change, and memories fade. Chevalier’s “bright blue sky” can’t help evoking a certain late-summer sky over Manhattan almost 13 years ago, at another moment that would come to mark a boundary between Before and After.

After Sept. 11, 2001, we were told — we told ourselves — that everything had changed. In a curious reversal of the logic of the Great War, the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were widely and quickly understood to herald “the death of irony.” What this meant, at least at first, was that a cultural style dominated ( according to Roger Rosenblatt in Time , among others) by “detachment and personal whimsy” would give way to an ethic of seriousness and sincerity. But in retrospect, the obituaries for irony were not only premature; they were also part of an aggressive reassertion of innocence, a concerted attempt to refute the conclusion of Larkin’s “MCMXIV.”

There followed a rehabilitation of the abstract words that Hemingway and his lost generation had found so intolerable. Ordinary soldiers were routinely referred to as “heroes” and “warriors,” even as their deaths and injuries were kept from public view. Those at home were encouraged toward displays of patriotism and support but also urged to continue with the optimistic routines of work, leisure and shopping “as if it were all” (to quote Larkin) “an August Bank Holiday lark.”

But the Great War is not quite finished with us. As the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have wound down in bloody inconclusiveness, the men and women who served in them have started writing, and what they have produced should return us to the morning after the Somme. “ Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk ,” Ben Fountain’s award-winning 2012 novel, pushes past irony into farce as it juxtaposes the experiences of a battered platoon plunged from the chaos of Iraq into the vulgar spectacle of the Super Bowl, where their service is honored and exploited. The book belongs in the irreverent company of “Catch-22,” which is to say on the same shelf as “All Quiet on the Western Front” and Chevalier’s “Fear.”

Phil Klay’s “ Redeployment ,” meanwhile, published this year, follows in the hard-boiled, matter-of-fact line of Hemingway and “The Things They Carried.” A deceptively modest collection of linked short stories, “Redeployment” bristles with place names, military numbers and acronyms, grim humor, sexual frustration, sentimental friendship and contempt for authority. It could only have been written by someone who was there, even if “there,” with some adjustments of technology, idiom and climate, might just as well be Ypres as Ramadi. And the moral might have been written by the British memoirist Edmund Blunden, who derived a stark lesson from his own experience at the Battle of the Somme: “The War had won, and would go on winning.”

An article last Sunday about the effect World War I had on America’s cultural consciousness misidentified the era in which John Bunyan’s “The Pilgrim’s Progress” — an allegory of hardship and redemption that many British soldiers and officers were familiar with — came out. It was published in the 17th century, not during the medieval years.

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• Unit 9.1: Global 1 Introduction
• Unit 9.2: The First Civilizations
• Unit 9.3: Classical Civilizations
• Unit 9.4: Political Powers and Achievements
• Unit 9.5: Social and Cultural Growth and Conflict
• Unit 9.6: Ottoman and Ming Pre-1600
• Unit 9.7: Transformation of Western Europe and Russia
• Unit 9.8: Africa and the Americas Pre-1600
• Unit 9.9: Interactions and Disruptions
• Unit 10.0: Global 2 Introduction
• Unit 10.1: The World in 1750 C.E.
• Unit 10.2: Enlightenment, Revolution, and Nationalism
• Unit 10.3: Industrial Revolution
• Unit 10.4: Imperialism
• Unit 10.5: World Wars
• Unit 10.6: Cold War Era
• Unit 10.7: Decolonization and Nationalism
• Unit 10.8: Cultural Traditions and Modernization
• Unit 10.9: Globalization and the Changing Environment
• Unit 10.10: Human Rights Violations
• Unit 11.0: US History Introduction
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• Unit 11.3A: Building a Nation
• Unit 11.03B: Sectionalism & the Civil War
• Unit 11.4: Reconstruction
• Unit 11.5: Gilded Age and Progressive Era
• Unit 11.6: Rise of American Power
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10.5 Enduring Issues Check-in

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Enduring Issues Check-In: Enduring Issues Check-Ins

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A hundred years after the end of the “war to end all wars,” USC experts discuss its surprising impact and how it affects us even today

One hundred years ago Sunday, the Allies and Germany agreed to an armistice ending World War I. The Great War claimed 40 million lives — but also serves as an unexpected pivot point for modern civilization.

“World War I is an amazingly important and underappreciated moment in history,” said Nicholas J. Cull , historian in the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism.

“The war ended when people were able to articulate a vision of the future, an optimism about how things were going to be better with nations working together.”

The war also rewrote the world map. Russia quit the war as domestic unrest triggered the Bolshevik revolution, rise of Communism and the Cold War. The Middle East changed with the defeat of Turkey and Britain’s pledge for a Jewish state in Palestine. The Western powers, fatigued by war, yielded to isolationism and appeasement as the Third Reich emerged, triggering World War II and the Holocaust.

Impact of World War I on medical care

Another thing forever changed by the war: medicine.

“Prior to WWI, most of the medicine practiced around the world was fairly archaic,” said Carl Chudnofsky , chair and professor of clinical emergency medicine at the Keck School of Medicine of USC.

The best physicians and researchers were in the military … so that led to great discoveries that made a huge difference for public health. Carl Chudnofsky

“But WWI was a time when the best physicians and researchers were in the military, not in civilian life, caring for patients, so that led to great discoveries that made a huge difference for public health.”

Chudnofsky points out that disease awareness and prevention leaped forward during WWI, first to heal soldiers and later for civilians. Medical advances included screening for tuberculosis, treatment for tetanus, vaccines for typhoid, prevention of venereal disease and disinfection for surgery.

Triage for medical attention emerged from the trenches of WWI to become a fixture in battlefields and other disasters. And mobile field hospitals and medical trains were innovations that helped evacuate casualties and save thousands of lives — techniques now common on battlefields.

Impact of World War I, the ‘war to end all wars’

And although World War I was called the “war to end all wars,” the U.S. has been at war somewhere around the world almost ever since. Michael Messner , professor of sociology at theUSC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences, said that’s because war and militarism are ingrained in American DNA.

“It’s part of our national identity, the old ideas of expansionism, white man’s burden and Manifest Destiny in the previous century,” he said. “We idealize war and military.”

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War and Conflict Enduring Issues Document Essay

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This enduring issues essay aligns with the New Framework Global History and Geography Regents in New York State but can be used as a general document based essay. This essay is based on five documents and includes instructions and a grading rubric. Topics include World War I, WWII, Vietnam and Korean Wars, the Long March, and Nelson Mandela.

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