The Great War
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Vol. I · Complete in thirteen chaptersEurope and the Near East1815 to 1923

The Great War

The causes·The fighting, front by front·The peace and its wreckage
The war that made the modern world

How a single murder in Sarajevo set four empires on the road to ruin, and what followed for the next fifty-two months.

On Sunday 28 June 1914 a nineteen-year-old student named Gavrilo Princip shot the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne in Sarajevo. Thirty-seven days later every great power in Europe was at war. When the guns fell silent at eleven o'clock on 11 November 1918, between nine and eleven million soldiers were dead, about twenty-one million more were wounded, and the German, Austro-Hungarian, Russian and Ottoman empires were finished or falling.

This chronicle follows the whole story: the alliances and rivalries that primed the explosion, the crisis of July 1914, each year of fighting on every front, the men, machines and home fronts that sustained it, and the uneasy peace that redrew the map. Every chapter has a living map beside it. Scroll, and the map moves with you.

Begin with chapter I Watch the war unfold
Plate 1Europe on 4 August 1914, the day Britain declared war. Click any country for its standing; drag to pan.
1,568days of war, from Austria-Hungary's declaration on 28 July 1914 to the Armistice
9–11 msoldiers, sailors and airmen killed
21 mmilitary wounded, many disabled for life
4empires destroyed: German, Austro-Hungarian, Russian, Ottoman

The Chronicle

The story in order, from the Congress of Vienna to the Treaty of Lausanne

I1815–1914 The Long Fuse For ninety-nine years the great powers avoided a general war by treaty, alliance and fear, weaving a web of promises so tight that a single pistol shot in the Balkans could pull every thread. Vienna · Bismarck · Dreadnoughts · The Balkans Listen · 1 h 8 min II28 June – 4 August 1914 Thirty-Seven Days to War An archduke dies in a Balkan street, Vienna and Berlin take a gamble, and in five weeks of ultimatums, telegrams and mobilization orders every great power but Italy marches into war. Sarajevo · The Blank Check · The Ultimatum · Mobilization IIIAugust – December 1914 The War of Movement From the siege guns at Liège to the carols sung across no man's land, five months of marching, massacre and maneuver ended in a stalemate that nobody had planned and nobody knew how to break. Liège · The Marne · Tannenberg · Ypres IV1915 Deadlock The trenches hardened from the Channel to the Alps, chlorine drifted over Ypres, and the Allies landed at Gallipoli while Germany broke Russia in the east; by December nobody was any closer to winning. Second Ypres · Gallipoli · Gorlice-Tarnów · The Lusitania · The Isonzo V1916 The Year of Attrition Falkenhayn tries to bleed France white at Verdun, Britain pays 57,470 casualties in a single day on the Somme, and Russia's Brusilov breaks Austria-Hungary's front as every great power learns what a long war costs. Verdun · Jutland · Brusilov · The Somme VI1917 The Year of Revolutions Germany stakes everything on the U-boat and brings the United States into the war, while Russia shakes off its Tsar and then its democrats, and French, British and Italian armies are tested to the edge of collapse. U-boats · Revolution · Passchendaele · Caporetto VIIJanuary – November 1918 The Last Gamble With Russia beaten and America still crossing the Atlantic, Ludendorff throws every man he has at the Western Front, and within eight months the empires of the Central Powers are gone. Fourteen Points · Operation Michael · Amiens · The Armistice VIII1918–1923 The Reckoning and the Remaking Four empires have fallen, ten million soldiers are dead, a plague is killing millions more, and the victors in Paris must decide what a new world will look like. Spanish Flu · Versailles · A Redrawn Map · Memory

Special Supplements

The war seen whole: trenches, machines, seas and skies, home fronts, the wider world

IX1914–1918 In the Trenches Millions of men lived for years in a muddy, rat-ridden maze of ditches. This is their war: the stand-to, the raid, the attack, the aid post, and the long routine of waiting. Dugouts · Mud · Shell Shock · Wipers Times · Other Fronts X1914–1918 The Machinery of War Shells, machine guns, gas, tanks and mines turned industrial output into killing power. Armies and surgeons learned, at terrible cost, how to use it, and how to repair what it did. Artillery · Machine Guns · Gas · Tanks · Mines · Medicine XI1914–1918 War on Waves and Wings The great fleets met only once, yet the war at sea starved Germany and nearly starved Britain. Above both, a new weapon grew from scouting planes into fighters, bombers and the first aircraft carriers. Grand Fleet · Blockade · U-Boats · Jutland · Air Aces · Bombers XII1914–1918 The Home Fronts Behind the trenches, entire societies were mobilized, taxed, fed, frightened, persuaded and silenced, and the strain of four years of total war broke some of them and remade the rest. Rationing · Propaganda · Women's War · Dissent · Memory XIII1914–1918 A World on Fire A quarrel over Serbia became a war fought from the Cameroons to Tsingtao and from Baghdad to the Atlantic, drawing in empires and their subjects and reshaping borders and hopes everywhere. Colonial Campaigns · Ottoman Fronts · Imperial Soldiers · Wartime Promises

About the maps. Country borders from 1886 to 1923 come from CShapes 2.0, which dates every change of a state's territory; the ticks on the atlas timeline are its dates. CShapes is licensed CC BY-NC-SA 4.0: please cite Schvitz, Guy, Seraina Rüegger, Luc Girardin, Lars-Erik Cederman, Nils Weidmann, and Kristian Skrede Gleditsch, 2022, "Mapping the International System, 1886-2017: The CShapes 2.0 Dataset," Journal of Conflict Resolution 66(1): 144-161 (icr.ethz.ch/data/cshapes). The borders of 1871 to 1885 and the short-lived states of 1916 to 1925 (Ukraine, Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, the Hejaz) come from the historical-basemaps project by André Ourednik (GPL-3.0). Both are cut to Natural Earth coastlines, islands and lakes (public domain), and colonies take the color of their owner. Front lines and offensive arrows are simplified reconstructions drawn town by town, accurate to the general course of the line rather than to the trench. All dates are Gregorian.

About the detail maps. Streets, buildings, railways, waterways and woods come from OpenStreetMap (© OpenStreetMap contributors, published under the ODbL), filtered as far as the data allows to what existed in 1914 to 1918. The hill shading is computed from the Copernicus DEM GLO-90 (© DLR e.V. 2010-2014 and © Airbus Defence and Space GmbH 2014-2018 provided under COPERNICUS by the European Union and ESA). Rivers at wider scales come from Natural Earth (public domain). Routes, lines, symbols and place names on the scenes are researched from the sources listed in each scene's data file.

About the pictures. Photographs and portraits come from Wikimedia Commons, the work of the archives, museums and photographers credited beside each picture. Most are in the public domain; the rest are used under the Creative Commons licenses named in their credits, and every credit links to the picture's page on Commons.

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