THE WAR COMES HOME TO EVERY TABLE

In July 1914 almost no European government planned to run its economy. Within a year, all of them were doing so. The turning point everywhere was the same discovery: that the war would not be short, and that the supply of shells, not the courage of riflemen, was the true measure of a nation's strength.

Britain: emergency law and the Ministry of Munitions

The Defence of the Realm Act (DORA) was rushed through Parliament on 8 August 1914, four days after the declaration of war, with barely a debate. It allowed the government to make regulations by decree: to censor the press, requisition land and factories, and restrict anything that might help the enemy. It was amended and extended again and again. A Central Control Board watered down beer, cut pub opening hours and, in 1915, banned "treating" (buying rounds of drinks), because drink among munitions workers was thought a menace to the war effort.

The real revolution came after the "Shell Crisis" of May 1915. At Aubers Ridge on 9 May the British artillery fired too few high-explosive shells to cut the German wire, and the infantry were slaughtered. Colonel Charles Repington's report in The Times on 14 May, drawing on information from the commander-in-chief Sir John French, set off a political storm that ended the Liberal government. Asquith formed a coalition on 25 May, and David Lloyd George became head of a new Ministry of Munitions. The Munitions of War Act of July 1915 let the Ministry take control of private firms, banned strikes in controlled establishments, and introduced "leaving certificates" without which a skilled worker could not change jobs. By 1918 the Ministry ran a network of national factories and supervised thousands of private firms. The scale of the change is clear from a single figure: in the week-long bombardment before the Somme in 1916, British guns fired roughly 1.5 million shells.

France: the sacred union

France declared a state of siege on 2 August 1914. In his message to parliament on 4 August, Raymond Poincaré declared that France would be defended by all her sons, "whose sacred union" nothing would break before the enemy. The phrase union sacrée stuck. Socialists, whose pacifist leader Jean Jaurès had been assassinated on 31 July, entered the government in late August, when Jules Guesde and Marcel Sembat joined the cabinet. The government itself left Paris for Bordeaux in early September 1914 as the Germans approached the Marne, and the shell shortages of the first winter forced it to take control of industry. The Socialist Albert Thomas, appointed to run artillery and munitions in 1915, built a system in which the state steered private manufacturers, allocated labor and set prices. French shell output rose from roughly 10,000 a day in 1914 to something like 250,000 a day by 1918 (sources differ on the exact figures).

Germany: Burgfrieden and "war socialism"

On 4 August 1914 Kaiser Wilhelm II told the Reichstag that he no longer recognized parties, only Germans. The political truce was labeled Burgfrieden, after the medieval rule that forbade quarrels within the walls of a besieged castle. The Social Democrats, Germany's largest party, voted for war credits and the trade unions pledged not to strike. Meanwhile Walther Rathenau, a leading figure at the electrical giant AEG (founded by his father), grasped within days that the British blockade would starve German industry of imported raw materials. The Prussian War Ministry established the War Raw Materials Department (Kriegsrohstoffabteilung) on 13 August 1914, with Rathenau as its first head. It requisitioned and rationed copper, rubber, wool, nitrates and metals, and created semi-public companies to distribute them. Later Germans were asked to hand in brass door handles, copper roofs and even church bells. After Hindenburg and Ludendorff took over the High Command in late August 1916, the Hindenburg Programme demanded a doubling of munitions and a tripling of machine guns and artillery, and the Auxiliary Service Law of December 1916 made most men from 17 to 60 liable for war work.

Paying for it

No state paid for the war from taxes alone. Britain raised perhaps a quarter to a third of its spending through taxation and borrowed the rest, at home through massive war loans and abroad from American bankers. The British national debt rose from about £650 million in 1914 to more than £7 billion at the end of the war. Germany financed an even larger share through borrowing, selling nine war loans that together raised nearly 100 billion marks, and the Reichsbank suspended gold redemption in August 1914 and printed money to cover the gap. The assumption was that the defeated enemy would pay. Prices roughly doubled in Britain and Germany during the war, and far more steeply in Austria-Hungary and Russia, where governments with the weakest finances relied most heavily on the printing press.

Britain began the war as the only great power without peacetime conscription, and for 18 months it relied on volunteers. When that system collapsed, the argument over compulsion split parties, families and entire dominions.

Britain: from Kitchener to the tribunals

Lord Kitchener's call on 6 August 1914 for 100,000 men produced a flood: about 300,000 enlisted in August and some 460,000 in September, and by Christmas around a million had joined, often in "Pals battalions" recruited from a single town, factory or football club. But the volunteers could not be replaced as fast as casualties rose, and the new munitions industry competed for the same skilled men. The National Registration Act of July 1915 counted every adult, and Lord Derby's scheme in the autumn asked men to "attest" their willingness to serve when called. Roughly 2.2 million did, but hundreds of thousands of single men did not, and Asquith had promised married men that single men would go first. The Military Service Act received royal assent on 27 January 1916 and came into force on 2 March, making all single men aged 18 to 41 liable to be called up. A second Act in May extended compulsion to married men. Ireland was excluded, and an attempt to extend conscription there in April 1918 provoked a general strike and helped drive Sinn Féin to its electoral triumph that December (see chapter VIII).

Conscientious objectors

The 1916 Act contained a "conscience clause", and local military service tribunals, often packed with elderly councillors and a military representative, decided who qualified. Just over 16,000 men claimed exemption as conscientious objectors. Some accepted non-combatant service, in the Non-Combatant Corps or in Army medical units; others took civilian work of "national importance" under the Home Office scheme. About 1,500 "absolutists" refused every form of compulsion. Roughly 6,000 objectors were court-martialed and imprisoned, many of them repeatedly, in conditions that left some dozens dead. In May 1916 a group of 16 objectors known as the "Richmond Sixteen" was shipped to France, where they were sentenced to death at Boulogne in a staged demonstration of army power; Haig commuted the sentences to ten years' penal servitude. The philosopher Bertrand Russell, an organizer for the No-Conscription Fellowship, was fined £100 in 1916 and lost his Cambridge lectureship, then served a prison term in 1918.

Canada: the crisis of 1917

Canada raised an expeditionary force of about 620,000 men, but enlistments fell sharply by 1917 after the terrible losses of the Somme. Prime Minister Robert Borden, who had repeatedly promised there would be no conscription, returned from visiting the front in May 1917 convinced that the Canadian Corps could not be maintained without it. The Military Service Act passed on 29 August 1917. French Canadians, who had enlisted at much lower rates than English Canadians and who felt little attachment to a British war, were bitterly opposed. Borden brought in a coalition "Union" government and fought the election of 17 December 1917 on conscription, helped by the Wartime Elections Act, which gave the vote to the female relatives of soldiers while removing it from conscientious objectors and many recently naturalized immigrants. The Unionists won a large majority but captured only a handful of Quebec's 65 seats. In the end about 100,000 men were drafted, of whom perhaps 24,000 reached the front before the armistice. At Easter 1918 riots in Quebec City led troops to open fire, and four civilians died. The wound shaped Canadian politics for decades.

Australia: two referendums lost

Australia's Prime Minister Billy Hughes proposed overseas conscription after the bloody summer of 1916, when the AIF suffered more than 5,000 casualties at Fromelles and some 23,000 in the weeks at Pozières. The referendum of 28 October 1916 was narrowly defeated, with about 52 percent voting No. Hughes was expelled from the Labor Party and formed a new coalition. A second referendum on 20 December 1917 failed by a larger margin, around 54 percent. The No campaign was a strange alliance of trade unionists who feared cheap labor, farmers who needed their sons, women who feared more telegrams, and Irish-Australian Catholics angered by the British execution of the Easter Rising leaders and championed by Archbishop Daniel Mannix of Melbourne. Remarkably, the Australian Imperial Force remained entirely volunteer: some 330,000 men served overseas, and about 60,000 died.

In August 1914 the suffragette leader Emmeline Pankhurst called off her militant campaign, the government released imprisoned suffragettes, and both sides in the long struggle over the vote declared a truce for the duration. What followed was the largest transfer of women into paid work, and into uniform, that Britain, France or Germany had ever seen. It also left historians arguing over what it all meant.

The munitionettes

As men left for the front and demand for shells soared, women filled the gap. Close to a million worked in British munitions factories by 1918. They filled shells with explosive, packed cartridges, turned lathes and inspected fuses, working 10- or 12-hour shifts, often at night, for roughly half to two-thirds of male wages. Those who handled TNT found that their skin and hair turned a bright yellow-orange: they were nicknamed "canaries". Toxic jaundice from TNT poisoning killed more than 100 women. Explosions were deadlier still: at Barnbow near Leeds on 5 December 1916, 35 women were killed in a single blast, and the press, constrained by censorship, was told to say almost nothing. At the National Shell Filling Factory in Chilwell, Nottinghamshire, on 1 July 1918, a vast explosion killed 134 people, and only 32 of the dead could be identified. Women also became bus conductors, tram drivers, farm laborers (the Women's Land Army, formed in 1917), clerks, bank tellers and police auxiliaries. Women's trade union membership roughly tripled between 1914 and 1918. In Germany and France too, women filled munitions plants, tram depots and offices.

Nurses, VADs and women in uniform

The Voluntary Aid Detachments, set up in 1909 to provide a reserve of trained volunteers, sent thousands of young women into hospitals at home and abroad, including the future novelist Vera Brittain and the future crime writer Agatha Christie. The Scottish Women's Hospitals, founded by the surgeon Dr. Elsie Inglis, ran field hospitals staffed entirely by women in France and the Balkans; Inglis died on 26 November 1917, a day after returning to Britain from Russia. In February 1917 the army created the Women's Army Auxiliary Corps (WAAC), renamed Queen Mary's Army Auxiliary Corps in 1918; some 57,000 women worked as cooks, clerks, telephonists, drivers and mechanics, freeing men for the trenches. The Women's Royal Naval Service followed in November 1917 and the Women's Royal Air Force in April 1918. Women were not allowed to fight, but some did. Flora Sandes, an Englishwoman who had gone to Serbia as a nurse, enlisted in the Serbian army in 1915, was wounded by a grenade in November 1916 and rose to sergeant-major. The Serbian soldier Milunka Savić, who fought from the Balkan wars to 1918, is often called the most decorated woman in the history of warfare.

In Russia the Provisional Government sought to shame deserting men with women's units. The 1st Russian Women's Battalion of Death was created in May 1917 by Maria Bochkareva, a peasant soldier who had joined the Tsar's army in 1914 with special permission and been wounded and decorated. About 2,000 women volunteered; after harsh discipline, perhaps 300 went to the front, where they fought near Smorgon in July. The experiment did not revive the army's morale, and the women's units were dissolved by the Bolsheviks in November 1917.

The vote

Several countries gave women the vote in direct connection with the war. In Britain the Representation of the People Act, which became law on 6 February 1918, gave the vote to all men over 21 (and to soldiers at 19) and to women over 30 who met a property qualification, enfranchising about 8.4 million women. The age gap was telling: most munitions workers, who tended to be in their teens and twenties, did not qualify, and equal suffrage did not arrive until 1928. Germany's revolutionary government decreed votes for women over 20 on 12 November 1918, and 37 women were elected to the National Assembly in January 1919. Austria, Poland and Canada acted in 1918, Russia (under the Provisional Government) in 1917, and the United States ratified the Nineteenth Amendment on 18 August 1920. France, whose women had done as much as any, did not grant the vote until 1944.

Wars are won by who can feed their people as well as their armies, and in this war the food supply broke some countries and tested all of them.

Britain: a close-run thing

Pre-war Britain imported about 60 percent of its food and around four-fifths of its wheat. German submarines were therefore a threat to national survival. The unrestricted submarine campaign of 1917 cut deeply: in April 1917, by some accounts, only about six weeks of wheat stood in reserve. Britain responded in stages. Wartime cultivation orders put more land under the plow, the Women's Land Army and soldiers on leave brought in harvests, and the number of allotments grew to well over a million. A Food Controller was appointed in December 1916 (Lord Devonport, followed in June 1917 by Lord Rhondda), and voluntary appeals for "meatless days" failed to prevent winter queues for margarine, butter and potatoes. Compulsory rationing followed: sugar from 31 December 1917, then meat, butter and margarine from February 1918 in London and the Home Counties, and nationally from April. Bread was never rationed; a government subsidy held the price of the standard loaf at 9 pence. Many historians, notably Jay Winter, argue that by distributing food more fairly, and with wages boosted by full employment, rationing left the poorer part of the British population healthier than before the war, and infant mortality actually fell.

Germany: the blockade and the turnip winter

Germany was not self-sufficient even in peacetime: it relied on imports for a share of its fats, animal feed and fertilizer. Britain's naval blockade, tightened by the Order in Council of 11 March 1915 (a reprisal for the German declaration of a submarine war zone), shut off most of that. Germany's own policy compounded the problem. Farm workers and farm horses went to the army; fertilizer was diverted to munitions; yields fell. In early 1915 a frantic culling of pigs, known as the Schweinemord, was meant to save grain for people but left meat and fat scarce afterwards. Bread rationing began in early 1915, maximum prices were fixed, and a War Food Office (Kriegsernährungsamt) was created in May 1916, but fixed prices simply drove food onto the black market.

Then the potato crop of 1916 failed, partly from blight and a wet autumn, to less than half of the previous year's size. Germans fell back on the swede, a coarse yellow turnip normally fed to animals, and the winter of 1916–17 became the Steckrübenwinter, the turnip winter. Turnips appeared as soup, bread, marmalade and "coffee". Official rations in the worst months supplied only about 1,000 to 1,200 calories a day to ordinary urban consumers, far below what a working adult needs. Those with money or country relatives survived by buying on the black market or making Hamsterfahrten, "hamster trips" to farms, to barter linens and jewelry for potatoes. Everyone else grew weak, and rickets, tuberculosis and "hunger edema" spread. Crowds rioted at markets and bakeries, and women took a prominent part in the food protests that helped trigger the strikes of April 1917.

How many died?

The scale of the German toll is genuinely contested. In December 1918 the German Board of Public Health claimed that some 763,000 civilians had died of the blockade's effects; a 1928 study sponsored by the Carnegie Endowment and edited by Franz Bumm estimated about 424,000 war-related civilian deaths (not counting Alsace-Lorraine), mostly in 1917–18; and other estimates fall in between. Part of the difficulty is separating deaths from malnutrition from deaths caused by influenza, tuberculosis and the other diseases that hunger made worse. Historians such as Avner Offer and C. Paul Vincent stress the blockade's role, while others stress German mismanagement, and the fact that the blockade, though real, was not the only cause. The Allied blockade continued after the armistice until July 1919, a fact that bitter Germans never forgot.

Elsewhere

In Austria-Hungary the two halves of the Monarchy squabbled over grain, and Hungary protected its own supplies. Vienna lived on turnips, ersatz coffee and war kitchens, and its children grew visibly smaller; in January 1918 a cut in the flour ration set off a strike wave across Austria. After the war the British reformer Eglantyne Jebb was arrested for distributing leaflets showing starving Viennese children, and founded the Save the Children Fund in 1919. In Petrograd the bread queues of early March 1917 ended in a revolution (see chapter VI). In northern Italy bread riots in Turin in late August 1917 left dozens dead. In the Ottoman Empire, requisitions, an Allied blockade of the coast and a plague of locusts in 1915 led to a famine in Mount Lebanon that killed an estimated 100,000 to 200,000 people, perhaps half the population.

In the summer of 1914 the British government had no propaganda organization at all. By 1918 it had a Ministry of Information, a press baron in charge of enemy propaganda, and a staff turning out millions of pamphlets. The same story, with local variations, played out in every belligerent state.

Wellington House and the war of words

In September 1914 the Liberal politician Charles Masterman gathered a secret meeting at Wellington House, the London offices of the National Insurance Commission, to create the War Propaganda Bureau. Its first big success was to enlist writers. On 18 September more than 50 of Britain's best-known authors, including Arthur Conan Doyle, Rudyard Kipling, Thomas Hardy, G. K. Chesterton and Arnold Bennett, signed a public declaration defending Britain's decision to go to war. By February 1918 it had become the Ministry of Information under Lord Beaverbrook, while Lord Northcliffe (the owner of The Times and the Daily Mail) ran propaganda aimed at the enemy from Crewe House. Germany answered with its own manifesto: on 4 October 1914, 93 German intellectuals, among them Max Planck, Wilhelm Röntgen and Fritz Haber, published an "Appeal to the Civilized World" denying German atrocities in Belgium.

The Bryce Report and the problem of atrocity

The most consequential British propaganda was the Bryce Report. A committee chaired by the distinguished jurist and former ambassador to Washington Viscount Bryce was asked to investigate "alleged German outrages" in Belgium, and its report appeared on 12 May 1915, five days after the sinking of the Lusitania, when anger was already at fever pitch. It rested on about 1,200 depositions from refugees, taken by lawyers who never put the witnesses under cross-examination, and most of the original testimony was later lost or destroyed. The report included stories of mutilated children and bayoneted babies that no one could verify.

The twist is that much of the underlying story was true. In 2001 John Horne and Alan Kramer's German Atrocities, 1914 showed from German and Belgian archives that German troops killed about 6,500 French and Belgian civilians in the first weeks of the war, in massacres at places like Dinant, Tamines and Leuven (Louvain), where the university library, with its 230,000 volumes, was burned. The German army was convinced that civilian snipers (francs-tireurs) were attacking it, an obsession for which Horne and Kramer found no evidence. The worst fabrications of the war came later: the 1917 "Kadaver" story, that the Germans boiled down corpses to make fat, was a mistranslation of a German word for animal carcasses, and in 1925 the Foreign Secretary was obliged to concede there was no evidence for it. Many historians argue that such exaggerations later made people slow to believe reports of genuine atrocities.

Posters, patriotism and the American effort

The most famous recruiting image of the war, Alfred Leete's picture of Kitchener pointing out of the page, first appeared on the cover of the magazine London Opinion on 5 September 1914 and soon became a poster. In the United States, James Montgomery Flagg adapted it in 1917 into "I Want YOU for U.S. Army", using his own face for Uncle Sam; over four million copies were printed. When the United States entered the war, President Wilson created the Committee on Public Information on 13 April 1917, headed by the journalist George Creel. It produced pamphlets, films and posters and organized some 75,000 volunteer "Four Minute Men", who gave short patriotic speeches in theaters, giving well over 750,000 in total.

Censorship: the press and the soldier's letter

The British Press Bureau, set up on 7 August 1914, controlled war news. At first, Kitchener banned correspondents from the front; from 1915 a handful of accredited journalists, wearing officers' uniforms, were allowed to report under strict supervision, and their dispatches were so heavily edited that after the war Philip Gibbs titled a memoir Now It Can Be Told. The press barons who owned the newspapers had their own power: when Northcliffe's Daily Mail attacked Kitchener over the shell shortage in May 1915, copies were burned publicly on the floor of the Stock Exchange.

Soldiers' letters were also read. In the British army, junior officers censored the mail of their own men, a duty many hated; the army also issued "green envelopes" that could be sealed by the soldier after a signed promise that they contained only private matters, and "Field Service Postcards" on which a man could only cross out phrases from a printed list, such as "I am quite well". The French army's postal control read samples of letters to measure morale, and its reports are now a precious source for historians. In France the satirical weekly Le Canard enchaîné was founded in September 1915 to mock the official "stuffing of skulls" (bourrage de crâne) that filled the newspapers.

In August 1914 almost every socialist party in Europe rallied to its flag, shattering the Second International, whose congresses had promised that workers of all countries would refuse to fight each other. Within a year a small minority had begun to say that the war was a catastrophe. Within three years, mass strikes and mutinies had shaken the combatants, and in Russia a revolution had destroyed the Tsarist state.

The socialist split

The German Social Democrats voted for war credits on 4 August 1914. On 2 December Karl Liebknecht cast the lone vote against, and the party eventually expelled its dissenters; Hugo Haase's breakaway Independent Social Democrats (USPD) was founded at Gotha in April 1917. In Switzerland, delegations from 11 countries met at Zimmerwald from 5 to 8 September 1915, and again at Kienthal in April 1916, to demand a peace without annexations; the Zimmerwald Left, led by Lenin, went further and called for the war between nations to be turned into a civil war. Women's movements organized their own peace efforts: about 1,200 women met at The Hague from 28 April to 1 May 1915 under Jane Addams and founded what became the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom. In Britain, the Union of Democratic Control, led by E. D. Morel, Ramsay MacDonald and others, urged a negotiated settlement; in November 1917 the Conservative grandee Lord Lansdowne called in a letter to the Daily Telegraph for exactly that. In August 1917 Pope Benedict XV issued a peace note that denounced the "useless slaughter".

Red Clydeside

Glasgow's shipyards and engineering works were swollen by the influx of workers. In 1915 landlords raised rents, and the women of Govan, led by Mary Barbour and others, formed a movement that came to be known as "Mrs Barbour's Army", blocking evictions and pelting sheriff's officers. On 17 November 1915 a vast crowd gathered at the Sheriff Court, with shipyard workers threatening to strike; the government capitulated and rushed through the Rent Restrictions Act, which froze rents at pre-war levels. Meanwhile skilled engineers on the Clyde Workers' Committee, including William Gallacher and David Kirkwood, resisted the dilution of skilled work with unskilled labor. In 1916 the government deported Kirkwood and others from the Clyde under DORA and suppressed the socialist newspaper Forward; the revolutionary John Maclean was jailed for sedition in 1916 and again in 1918.

Hunger and the strike waves of 1917–1918

It was food, above all, that drove the unrest in the Central Powers. In Austria, the Prime Minister Count Stürgkh governed without parliament, and on 21 October 1916 the Socialist leader's son Friedrich Adler shot him dead in a Vienna restaurant as a protest; Adler was sentenced to death but reprieved and released in 1918. Parliament was recalled in May 1917. After the Russian February Revolution, about 300,000 workers in Berlin, Leipzig and other cities struck in April 1917 over a cut in the bread ration, demanding peace and democratic reform. In January 1918 an even bigger wave began in Austria on 14 January, after the flour ration was reduced, and spread to some 700,000 workers; shortly afterward, from 28 January, about a million Germans, including 400,000 in Berlin, laid down their tools, demanding peace without annexations. The Social Democratic leaders Friedrich Ebert and Philipp Scheidemann joined the strike committees in order to end the strike, and the army arrested the radical leaders.

In France the mutinies of spring 1917 (see chapter VI) had civilian echoes in the strikes of Paris garment workers, the midinettes, that May and June. Georges Clemenceau, who took office in November 1917, answered unrest with a campaign against "defeatism": the former interior minister Louis Malvy was exiled, and spy fever peaked when the Dutch dancer Mata Hari was shot at Vincennes on 15 October 1917.

The United States: dissent as treason

America, the newest belligerent, was in some ways the harshest. The Espionage Act (15 June 1917) and the Sedition Act (16 May 1918) made it a crime to obstruct the draft or to criticize the war effort, the form of government or the flag. Roughly 2,000 people were prosecuted. The Post Office banned the radical magazine The Masses, federal agents raided the offices of the Industrial Workers of the World in September 1917 and more than a hundred of its leaders were convicted, and Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman were jailed for opposing the draft. The Socialist Party leader Eugene V. Debs, who had won nearly a million votes for president in 1912, gave a speech in Canton, Ohio on 16 June 1918 praising imprisoned antiwar activists. He was sentenced to ten years; the Supreme Court upheld the conviction in 1919; and Debs ran for president in 1920 from his cell in Atlanta, winning more than 900,000 votes. President Harding commuted his sentence at Christmas 1921.

The war made borders and loyalties suddenly dangerous. Millions of people found themselves on the wrong side of a frontier they had never noticed, and millions more were driven from their homes by armies.

The enemy within

Britain passed the Aliens Restriction Act on 5 August 1914, requiring all foreigners to register. At first only men of military age were interned, but on 7 May 1915 the Lusitania was sunk with the loss of 1,198 lives, and mobs attacked German-owned shops in Liverpool, London and other British cities (similar riots broke out in Canada and South Africa). The government responded by interning all remaining enemy-alien men of military age and repatriating the rest. In all some 32,000 civilians were interned in Britain, the majority held in camps like Knockaloe on the Isle of Man, which at its peak held more than 20,000 men in a barbed-wire town with its own workshops, orchestras and newspapers. A Swiss doctor who visited the camps coined the term "barbed wire disease" for the despair that overcame prisoners with no release date. Most were not freed until 1919. Germany interned thousands of British men at Ruhleben racecourse near Berlin, where the prisoners organized football leagues, theater and lectures.

The campaign extended to names. Prince Louis of Battenberg, First Sea Lord, resigned in October 1914 under a press attack on his German birth. In July 1917, as German Gotha bombers were raiding London, George V proclaimed on the 17th that the royal house would no longer be Saxe-Coburg and Gotha but Windsor; the Battenbergs became Mountbatten. The Ontario town of Berlin voted in 1916 to rename itself Kitchener. In Canada, the War Measures Act of 22 August 1914 led to the internment of about 8,600 "enemy aliens", more than half of them Ukrainians from the Austro-Hungarian Empire; tens of thousands more were required to register and report regularly to the police.

America against the hyphen

When the United States entered the war, anti-German feeling there reached a pitch of hysteria. Sauerkraut became "liberty cabbage", German measles "liberty measles". Many states banned the teaching of German in schools; in May 1918 Iowa's governor issued the "Babel Proclamation" forbidding the use of any language but English in public. On 5 April 1918 a mob in Collinsville, Illinois, seized Robert Prager, a German-born coal miner who had been rejected by the Navy, and lynched him; a jury acquitted the men tried for the killing after deliberating for less than half an hour.

The refugees

The invasion of Belgium sent perhaps 1.5 million people fleeing, about a fifth of the population. Around a million went to the Netherlands, most of whom later returned; some 325,000 went to France; and about 250,000 came to Britain, the largest single influx of refugees in British history. They arrived at Folkestone and were housed by thousands of families, churches and local committees. The Belgians became "poor little Belgium" made flesh, though sympathy cooled as the war lengthened. At Birtley in County Durham the Belgian government built a model munitions village called Elisabethville. Most refugees went home in 1919.

The largest displacement of all took place in Russia. During the Great Retreat of 1915 the Russian army, evacuating territory it feared losing, followed a scorched-earth policy: it burned crops and villages and drove civilians eastward. Jews, accused of disloyalty, were expelled from frontier areas, including roughly 200,000 from Courland and the Kovno region in the spring of 1915. By the end of 1915 there were about three million refugees in the Russian Empire, and by 1917 perhaps six to seven million, according to the historian Peter Gatrell. Their arrival in cities already short of food and housing was one of the pressures that undermined the old regime.

Under occupation

Roughly nine million people lived under German occupation in Belgium and the occupied departments of northern France. Occupied Belgium faced starvation, since it had imported much of its food before the war, and neither the Germans nor the Allied blockade authorities would take responsibility for feeding it. The Commission for Relief in Belgium, organized by the American mining engineer Herbert Hoover from October 1914, bought food in the neutral world and delivered it under neutral supervision, feeding about nine million people in Belgium and northern France over four years. Germany also deported civilians as laborers. Beginning in the autumn of 1916, about 120,000 unemployed Belgians were deported to work in Germany, until international protest, including from the Pope and neutral governments, forced a halt in early 1917. At Easter 1916 some 20,000 inhabitants of Lille, Roubaix and Tourcoing, many of them young women, were rounded up and sent to work on farms.

On 12 October 1915 the English nurse Edith Cavell was shot by firing squad in Brussels for helping about 200 Allied soldiers to escape to the neutral Netherlands. Her execution was legal under German military law, but a propaganda disaster for Germany. She is reported to have said before her death that "patriotism is not enough" and that she must have no hatred or bitterness towards anyone.

Before 1914 most Europeans assumed war was something that happened to soldiers. The conflict ended that assumption on British soil, in French skies and, most dramatically, in a Canadian harbor.

The seaside bombardment

At about 8 a.m. on 16 December 1914, a German squadron under Admiral Franz von Hipper, including the battlecruisers Seydlitz, Moltke, Von der Tann and Derfflinger and the armored cruiser Blücher, emerged from the winter mist off the Yorkshire coast and shelled Scarborough, Whitby and the Hartlepools. The shelling went on for about an hour and a half in all and killed some 130 people (counts run from 122 to 137), most of them civilians, wounding several hundred more. It was a tactical success for the German navy but a strategic blunder: the attack on undefended holiday towns, and the death of women and children, caused an outcry, and the recruiting poster "Remember Scarborough!" was soon on every wall. The German squadron had also escaped, narrowly, a British trap laid by a force of battlecruisers alerted by codebreakers (see chapter XI).

The airship and the bomber

The first Zeppelin raid on Britain took place on the night of 19 January 1915, when two airships bombed Great Yarmouth and King's Lynn and killed four people. On 31 May 1915 the first raid on London killed seven. The Zeppelin raids were a terror weapon more than a military one: the airships were slow and hard to steer, bombed blind and inaccurately, and until the British introduced incendiary bullets in 1916 were difficult to bring down. On the night of 2–3 September 1916 Lieutenant William Leefe Robinson shot down the airship SL 11 over Cuffley, north of London, in a fireball visible for miles, and was awarded the Victoria Cross. Londoners cheered in the streets. Over the whole war the airship raids killed about 550 people in Britain.

On 13 June 1917, 14 Gotha bombers attacked London in daylight, killing 162 people and injuring 432. One bomb hit an elementary school in Poplar and killed 18 children. The panic that followed prompted the British to reorganize their air defenses, to create a unified air force (see chapter XI), and to send Londoners into the Underground to shelter. Together, airships and airplanes killed about 1,400 people in Britain. These numbers seem small beside the casualty lists of the Western Front, but their effect on thinking was immense: a generation of strategists and politicians, including Stanley Baldwin, later spoke of the bomber that "will always get through".

The Paris Gun

On the morning of 23 March 1918, during the German spring offensive, a shell fell without warning on the Quai de la Seine in Paris. There was no aircraft overhead; no gun was within sight. The shell had come from a Krupp super-gun, the Paris Gun (Kaiser-Wilhelm-Geschütz), hidden in the forest of Saint-Gobain near Crépy about 75 miles (120 km) away. Its shells climbed some 25 miles into the stratosphere, where the thin air reduced their drag, and took about three minutes to arrive. The gun was a technical marvel but a military irrelevance; it could not be aimed precisely and could not change the war's outcome. On Good Friday, 29 March 1918, a shell hit the church of Saint-Gervais during a service, killing 91 people. By the time the guns fell silent in August, some 250 people had died in Paris.

Halifax

The deadliest accident of the home fronts took place in Canada, in a port crowded with convoys and relief ships. At about 8:45 a.m. on 6 December 1917, the Norwegian relief ship Imo and the French freighter Mont-Blanc collided in the Narrows of Halifax harbor. The Mont-Blanc was loaded with high explosives (picric acid, TNT and guncotton) and with benzol stacked in drums on deck. The benzol caught fire. About twenty minutes later, at 9:04, the ship exploded, producing the largest man-made blast to that date, equal to about 2.9 kilotons of TNT. The explosion leveled the Richmond district of the city, killed about 1,782 people and injured around 9,000. A blizzard hit the next day, hindering rescue. Boston sent trains of relief supplies; Nova Scotia still sends the city a Christmas tree every year in thanks. A railway dispatcher, Vince Coleman, who stayed at his post to warn approaching trains, is remembered as one of the heroes.

The First World War produced more verse, fiction, music, painting and film than any earlier conflict, and then spent a century arguing over what it all meant.

The poets

The first poems of the war were patriotic. Rupert Brooke's sonnet "The Soldier" ("If I should die, think only this of me") was read from the pulpit of St Paul's Cathedral on Easter Sunday 1915, shortly before the poet died of blood poisoning on 23 April on a hospital ship off the Greek island of Skyros. The Canadian surgeon John McCrae wrote "In Flanders Fields" on 3 May 1915 after the death of a friend, and Punch published it in December of that year; he himself died of pneumonia in January 1918. The poppy as a symbol of remembrance grew out of the poem.

A harder-edged poetry came from the trenches. Siegfried Sassoon, a decorated officer, published his "Soldier's Declaration" in July 1917, protesting that the war was being "deliberately prolonged"; the authorities declared him shell-shocked and sent him to Craiglockhart war hospital near Edinburgh, where he met Wilfred Owen. Owen's poems, among them "Anthem for Doomed Youth" and "Dulce et Decorum Est", were almost entirely unpublished when he was killed on 4 November 1918, one week before the armistice, while crossing the Sambre-Oise Canal. Isaac Rosenberg, a working-class Jewish poet and painter from London, wrote "Break of Day in the Trenches" in 1916 and was killed on 1 April 1918. In France, Guillaume Apollinaire, wounded in the head in March 1916, published Calligrammes in 1918 and died of influenza on 9 November. In Germany, the Expressionist poet August Stramm, whose spare, fragmentary verse broke with every convention, was killed on the Eastern Front in September 1915. The vast majority of verse written during the war, however, was conventional and patriotic, and the canon of Owen and Sassoon was largely created by the 1920s and after.

The painters

Art tried to catch up with industrial war. Paul Nash, an official war artist, painted the shell-blasted landscapes of Ypres, from We Are Making a New World (1918) to The Menin Road (1919). C. R. W. Nevinson, whose earlier Futurist style had given way to bleak realism, saw his painting Paths of Glory (1917) banned by the censor; he hung it at an exhibition in 1918 with a strip of brown paper across it labeled "Censored". The German painter Otto Dix, who served as a machine-gunner on the Western Front, produced in 1924 a cycle of 50 etchings called Der Krieg ("The War"), in which decaying corpses and the faces of the dying are shown without comfort. The German sculptor Käthe Kollwitz, whose son Peter was killed in October 1914, worked for years on her memorial Grieving Parents. In Zurich, in February 1916, a group of refugee artists opened the Cabaret Voltaire and launched Dada, an anti-art protest against a civilization that had produced the war.

Music hall, songs and film

The songs of the war were mostly cheerful. "It's a Long Way to Tipperary" (written in 1912 and picked up by soldiers in 1914), "Pack Up Your Troubles", "Keep the Home Fires Burning" and "Goodbye-ee" filled the music halls, where male impersonators like Vesta Tilley sang recruiting numbers and were known as "England's greatest recruiting sergeant". Soldiers had their own bawdy versions, and some sang bitterly to the tune of "Auld Lang Syne": "We're here because we're here." In France the anonymous "Chanson de Craonne" mourned the dead of the 1917 Chemin des Dames offensive and was banned by the army.

Film was new. The Battle of the Somme, a feature-length documentary released in Britain on 21 August 1916, was seen by an estimated 20 million people in six weeks, perhaps half the population. Its most famous scene, soldiers climbing out of a trench, was in fact staged behind the lines. In Germany, the High Command's wish to rival Allied propaganda produced UFA, the film company founded in December 1917.

Meanwhile, the ways societies remembered were being fixed. The Cenotaph in Whitehall was unveiled as a permanent monument in 1920, the year the body of the Unknown Warrior was buried in Westminster Abbey, and the first Poppy Appeal took place in 1921. By then the war was already passing from experience into memory, and the argument over its meaning had begun.