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The full scope of World War I is enormous. In this article, I discuss why World War I happened, the major battles, why the US entered the war, how World War I ended, how World War I led to World War II, the lessons we can learn from World War I, and how the current world geopolitical state of affairs is very close to breaking into World War III.
I have a lot to talk about, so let’s dive in.
Several important events led up to World War I:
1)Alliances
Austria-Hungary was a dual monarchy. This meant that each half of the empire had its own constitution, government, and parliament. The citizens of each half were also treated as foreigners in the other half. But both halves of Austria-Hungary were ruled by the same Emperor, Franz Josef.
Both Russia and France feared the rising power of Germany and its alliance with Austria-Hungary. Furthermore, France had been humiliated by Germany in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71. For these two reasons, Russia and France made an alliance in 1894. France then made an alliance with Great Britain in 1904. Finally, Russia made an alliance with Great Britain in 1907. These three alliances are known as the Triple Entente.
Alliances were a crucial part of the main powers in the world before the war. Richard S. Fogarty, an associate professor of history at University of Albany, explained, “The alliance system was critical to shaping the war, and even in helping bring it on: it created a set of expectations about international rivalry and competition, determining what kind of war Europeans imagined and prepared for.”
2)Bosnia-Herzegovina
Bosnia-Herzegovina is made up of three “constituents” peoples: Bosniaks, Croats, and Serbs, along with smaller minority groups. Bosniaks, Croats, and Serbs are all Slavic.
Under an 1878 treaty, Austria-Hungary began governing Bosnia-Herzegovina, even though technically, Bosnia-Herzegovina was still part of the Ottoman Empire. When Austria-Hungary annexed Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1908, the Slavic people in Bosnia-Herzegovina, aided by the Slavic people of Russia, resisted the rule of Austria-Hungary.
3)The Ottoman Empire Starts To Crumble And The Balkan Wars
Italy invaded Libya in 1911 trying to take it from the Ottoman Empire. After a peace treaty, the Ottoman military left Libya and let Italy colonize it. As Fogarty notes, “The real significance was that it exposed the shakiness of the Ottoman Empire and its slipping control over peripheral territories.”
Furthermore, in the First Balkan War, in 1912, Serbia, Greece, and Montenegro defeated Ottoman forces.
The Second Balkan War was fought over Macedonia, with Bulgaria losing to the Greeks and Serbs with the Ottoman Empire and Romania also helping out.
Ultimately, the Balkan Wars made the region even more unstable. In the power void left behind by the Ottoman Empire, tensions grew between Serbia and Austria-Hungary. That, in turn, led Austria-Hungary and its ally Germany, to decide that a war with the Serbs would be needed at some point to strengthen Austria-Hungary’s position. Richard S. Fogarty notes, “Many historians consider the Balkan Wars as the true beginning of the First World War.” Fogarty describes World War I as “a war of empires, some expanding or seeking to expand, some keen to hold on to what they had, others trying desperately not to lose what they had left.”
Born Archduke Franz Ferdinand Carl Ludwig Joseph Maria of Austria, Franz Ferdinand was the eldest son of Archduke Karl Ludwig. Karl Ludwig was the brother of the Emperor of Austria-Hungary, Franz Josef.
In 1875, when he was 11-years-old, his cousin Francis V, Duke of Moderna died, naming Franz Ferdinand his heir. Thus, Franz Ferdinand became one of the wealthiest men in Austria.
Fun fact: Franz Ferdinand became an avid hunter. By the end of his life, he tallied 272,511 kills. As an adult, hunting trophies—an estimated 100,000—cluttered his estate. Gary B. Cohen, a history professor at the University of Minnesota said of Franz Ferdinand’s estate, “You had to be careful walking down the halls to avoid getting impaled by antlers.”
Archduke Franz Ferdinand was the nephew of the Emperor, Franz Josef, so how did Franz Ferdinand become next in line to the throne?
Crown Prince Rudolf was the only son of Emperor Franz Joseph. The Emperor arranged his son’s marriage for dynastic purposes, and on May 10th, 1881, Prince Rudolf, who was 22-years-old married Princess Stéphanie of Belgium who was only 15-years-old.
The marriage was not a love match. Prince Rudolf and his wife had one child. Accounts say that Prince Rudolf was a high‐minded, sensible, serious man who spoke four or five languages, wrote books which can still be read with pleasure, and was deeply aware of his responsibilities. He was handsome and debonair, immensely attractive to women, and popular with the troops he commanded. By contrast, Stéphanie was plain, oddly colorless, had little education, a hot temper and a stubborn will. To close friends, Rudolf sometimes confessed that his marriage to the Belgian princess was a burden to him.
Rudolf became increasingly unstable as he drank heavily and was having many affairs. This behavior, however, was not entirely new as Rudolf had a long history of reckless promiscuity prior to his marriage.
Early in November 1888, Prince Rudolf met Baroness Maria Vetsera for the first time and they began to have an affair. Maria was 17-years-old and was described as being warm‐hearted and empty‐headed—a creature of impulse.
Prince Rudolf had invited two friends, Prince Phillip and Count Hoyos, to spend the day of January 29th, 1889 hunting with him at an imperial hunting lodge in Mayerling, Austria. When the day came, his friends showed up, but Prince Rudolf complained that he caught a cold and that his friends should go hunting without him. Count Hoyos hunted through most of the day, but Prince Philipp had to return to Vienna for a state dinner that evening and abruptly broke off the hunt at 1:30. At 5:30 in the afternoon, Count Hoyos returned to the lodge to rest after an unsuccessful day of hunting. At 7 o’clock he dined with Rudolf. Rudolf was in an expansive mood, drank a good deal of wine, spoke about politics, and about the dinner they were eating. Count Hoyos spent the night in a workman’s cottage on the estate, 500 yards from the palatial lodge.
Early on the morning of January 30th, Rudolf, fully dressed, told his personal servant, Loschek, to have the carriage ready and breakfast prepared by 7:30. He also told Loschek he was going back to bed and wanted to be awakened in an hour’s time. At 8 o’clock, Count Hoyos was about to join Rudolf for breakfast when a guard came running up with the news that Loschek had been unable to wake his master.
Count Hoyos hammered on the bedroom door. There was no answer. It occurred to him that Rudolf might have been asphyxiated by coal‐gas fumes, and he was about to order the door broken down when he remembered that Prince Philipp would soon be arriving, and in fact the Prince was just driving up.
Together they discussed what should be done. It was decided that they should both assume responsibility for breaking down the door, but Loschek was to enter the bedroom alone and report to them. This was done. Loschek said the Crown Prince was dead, lying over the edge of the bed with a great pool of blood in front of him.
The dead body of Baroness Maria Vetsera was found nude, lying on the bed.
Rigor mortis had already set in.
For some unknown reason, neither Prince Philipp nor Count Hoyos entered the death chamber.
Without closer examination in the poor light, Loschek assumed that the Crown Prince had drunk poison from the glass since he knew strychnine caused bleeding.
He could not have looked very closely, for half of Rudolph’s skull had been blown off by a bullet fired at close range.
It was decided that Count Hoyos should drive at once to Vienna to bring the news to the Emperor. He told a confused story of how the Crown Prince had died of poison administered by the Baroness. Though it was a very odd story, a convenient fiction was invented: it was decided to attribute his death to the rupture of an aneurysm of the heart.
Two days later, the court physician, Dr. Hermann von Widerhofer, reported to the Emperor that Rudolf had been killed instantly by the bullet and suffered no pain. The Emperor was thunderstruck. Wbat bullet? When? How? Told that Rudolf had apparently shot Maria Vetsera and later turned the revolver on himself, the Emperor collapsed on the floor.
To this day, the official narrative of Mayerling is that the Crown Prince first shot the Baroness in a murder-suicide pact and sat by her body for several hours before shooting himself.
To reinforce the narrative of a murder-suicide pact, several letters in which Rudolf and Maria said goodbye to loved ones were published in part. Only one was published in full. These letters, which might have been written by a skilled forger, do not offer incontrovertible proof that Rudolf shot Maria and then shot himself. It was a time when the forgery of letters had been elevated into a fine art, especially in the secret chanceries of state. We know that the official documents concerning the case were doctored, and that the most important documents were never published.
A murder-suicide pact was the easiest explanation, but it was not the only explanation, nor the most likely one. Several facts stand out that seem to contradict this theory. First, there’s the fact that Rudolf had earlier that day told his personal servant, Loschek, to prepare breakfast and his carriage. He clearly was planning to go hunting. Second, why did only Loschek enter the murder chamber? Why wouldn’t Count Hoyos and Prince Phillip also go in and evaluate the scene? Third, how could Loschek not notice that half of Rudolf’s head had been blown off at short range by a bullet? Someone was lying. Probably many people.
Many theories abound as to what really happened that day at Mayerling.
A physician named Gerd Holler argues in his book Mayerling—New Documents on the Tragedy 100 Years Afterward that Maria was three months pregnant with Rudolf’s child. Rudolf arranged an abortion for Maria, who died in the process. Rudolf then committed suicide. This theory came about because in 1959, Gerd Holler, accompanied by a member of the Vetsera family and specialists in funereal preservation, inspected Maria Vetsera’s remains. Holler carefully examined the skull and other bones for traces of a bullet hole but stated that he found no such evidence. Intrigued, Holler claimed he petitioned the Vatican to inspect their 1889 archives of the affair, where the papal nuncio’s investigation had concluded that only one bullet was fired. Lacking forensic evidence of a second bullet, Holler advanced the theory that Vetsera died accidentally, probably as the result of an abortion, and it was Rudolf who consequently shot himself.
Another theory is advanced by Clemens M. Gruber, in a piece called The Fateful Days of Mayerling where he argues Vetsera’s relatives forced their way into the lodge and Rudolf drew a revolver, accidentally shooting the Baroness. He was then killed by one of her relatives.
A third, potentially likely theory comes from Crown princess Stéphanie who insisted to a relative that the brunette Maria was conniving, fiercely ambitious and anything but the suicidal type. She had had lovers before Rudolf, and hoped, as unrealistically as a six-dollar bill, that the crown prince would divorce Stéphanie and marry her. When he instead broke off their relationship, Maria begged for one last sojourn together at Mayerling. But the couple fell into an argument. According to Stéphanie, the furious girl waited until her royal lover had fallen asleep and then used a cutthroat razor to cut off his penis. Understandably peeved, Rudolf shot her, and then, after a considerable period of vacillation (while likely in tremendous pain), he shot himself.
To strengthen the penis-cutting argument, a certain Baron Lafaurie claimed that he heard from the lips of Prince Philipp that Maria Vetsera had castrated Rudolf with a sharp razor while he slept, and he then strangled her and shot himself through the mouth.
Maybe Lorena Bobbitt wasn’t as original as we all thought she was.
Yet there were more theories. Some believed Rudolf was murdered by a jealous husband. Others remembered that the gamekeeper Wodiczka insisted that he had been told at 7 o’clock in the morning that there would be no hunting that day because the Prince was dead, though Loschek did not find the bodies until about 8:30. If the gamekeeper was speaking the truth, the murders might have been committed by the house servants.
There are many nobles who stood to gain from Rudolf’s death. Foremost among them was Prime Minister Count Edward Taafe, who showed extraordinary elation upon learning of Rudolph’s death and was easily in a position to bring murders about then leave a trail of doctored documents, forged letters and forged affidavits.
Count Hoyos, Loschek and Prince Philipp all acted strangely; they seemed to know far more about the deaths in the hunting lodge than they ever admitted. They were the people we know were there and they could have easily conspired together. The strange circumstances of how they decided to inspect the murdered bodies certainly points to them.
Even the Emperor himself could have sent assassins. Once a year, on the anniversary of Rudolf’s death, Emperor Franz Josef would briefly appear by his son’s tomb, mutter a prayer and then hurry away.
The truth is, no one today knows for sure whether it was a murder-suicide pact, a double murder, or something else. Nevertheless, Prince Rudolf’s death changed the trajectory of history. Emperor Franz Josef had no more sons, so that meant the next-in-line for the crown was his brother, Karl Ludwig, who was the father of Franz Ferdinand. In 1896, Karl Ludwig died of Typhoid fever. As his eldest son, Franz Ferdinand became the presumptive heir to the throne of Austria-Hungary.
Countess Sophie Chotek von Wognin was born in Stuttgart, Germany, the fourth daughter of an Austrian Ambassador. Though the Chotek family were nobles, they were not of dynastic rank, meaning Sophie could not become queen nor could her children become rulers. Instead, she became a lady-in-waiting (an attendant or personal assistant) to Archduchess Isabella, wife of Archduke Friedrich, Duke of Teschen. Franz Ferdinand, who was stationed at a military garrison in Prague, paid frequent visits to Haltburn Castle, the home of Archduke Friedrich, and it was assumed that he had fallen in love with Friedrich’s eldest daughter, Archduchess Marie Christine. When Isabella discovered Franz Ferdinand’s locket lying on the tennis court, she opened it, expecting to find a photo of her daughter. Instead, the locket contained a photo of Sophie. From this, a scandal ensued. Franz Ferdinand refused to renounce Sophie to marry equally and beget an heir to the throne. Under pressure from family members, Emperor Franz Josef allowed Franz Ferdinand to marry Sophie, under one condition. Franz Ferdinand had to appear before archdukes, ministers, and dignitaries and execute by signature an official instrument in which he publicly declared that Sophie would be his morganatic wife (morganatic marriage=a marriage between people of unequal social rank, especially in the context of royalty. Sometimes referred to as a Left-handed marriage), never to bear the title of Empress, Queen, or Archduchess, and acknowledging that their descendants would neither inherit nor be granted dynastic rights or privileges. Franz Ferdinand did this, and on July 1st, 1900, the two wed.
Unlike his cousin, Crown Prince Rudolf, Franz Ferdinand was a man who married for love.
On June 28, 1914, Franz Ferdinand was in the Austro-Hungarian province of Bosnia-Herzegovina accompanied by his wife, Sophie. He was there as the inspector general of the imperial army. The visit was not a popular one. Balkan politics were turbulent, and the neighboring kingdom of Serbia coveted Bosnia. Moreover, the date chosen for the imperial visit and imperial show of force was June 28, a black date in Serbian history: it was the anniversary of the Turkish victory over Serbia at the Battle of Kosovo in 1389. This fanned the flames of dissent of Serbian nationalists even further.
Gavrilo Princip was born into a Bosnian Serb peasant family and was trained in terrorism by the Serbian secret society known as the Black Hand (true name Ujedinjenje ili Smrt, Union or Death). Wanting to destroy Austro-Hungarian rule in the Balkans and to unite the South Slav peoples into a federal nation, he believed that the first step must be the assassination of a member of the Habsburgs, the Austrian imperial family, or a high official of the government.
The Black Hand was founded in Belgrade as an outgrowth of an older Serb nationalist group: Narodna Odbrana (meaning The People’s Defense or National Defense). The Black Hand took over the older group’s work of Anti-Austrian propaganda within Serbia, which included sabotage, espionage and political murders abroad—especially in provinces Austria-Hungary wished to annex. The group included many radicals, government officials, professionals, and army officers.
Having learned that Franz Ferdinand, as inspector general of the imperial army, would pay an official visit to Sarajevo (the capital and largest city of Bosnia-Herzegovina) in June 1914, Gavrilo Princip, his associate, Nedjelko Čabrinović, and five other revolutionaries visited the grave of Bogdan Žerajić in Sarajevo who four years earlier made an attempt to assassinate General Marijan Varešanin, the Governor of Bosnia-Herzegovina.
Bogdan Žerajić was a member of the secret society Слобода (Meaning Freedom in Serbian) and he believed the government to be illegal and illegitimate having nothing to do with his government.
After reading an article written by Risto Radulović who said he did not see glorious moments of the nation or a single tragedy which he believed was necessary for the struggle of their country, Bogdan Žerajić yelled, “There will be a tragedy!”
One week before Žerajić attempted to assassinate General Varešanin, Emperor Franz Josef was in Sarejevo peacefully parading through the streets in horse-drawn carriage.
Žerajić despairingly told a friend he had twice gotten close enough to the Emperor he could have practically touched him, but for unknown reasons, his pistol stayed cold in his pocket.
Two weeks later, Žerajić took up his spot next to the Miljacka River in Sarajevo, and waited for the Governor’s car to pass. As the car trundled by, Žerajić took five shots in its direction. All five shots barely missed General Varešanin.
It isn’t clear if Žerajić knew he had failed or if he thought the job was done, but with the sixth bullet, he turned the gun on himself, aimed at his temple, and pulled the trigger. This last shot didn’t miss. Though he was dead, Žerajić lived on in the hearts of members of secret societies in Serbia as being the first man to stand up against the annexation of Bosnia-Herzegovina by Austria-Hungary.
This is the man who inspired Gavrilo Princip, Nedjelko Čabrinović, and their five other co-conspirators. The night of June 27th, they placed a handful of the “earth of free Serbia” on his grave.
The next day, on June 28th, all seven men were armed with bombs and pistols, each possessing a capsule of cyanide, awaiting Franz Ferdinand’s procession. The policemen numbered only 120 for a procession route of four miles. Before the event, one police official stated that, “security measures on June 28 will be in the hands of Providence.”
Archduke Franz Ferdinand had received numerous warnings against going to Bosnia in the first place. Assassination attempts were rife in the region. Even on the eve of the Sarajevo procession, Franz Ferdinand was forcefully warned by Bosnian officials and men in his own entourage about the dangers of driving through the capital in an open-air car on a Serb national holiday. Yet it was less his well-known stubbornness than an honorable sense of imperial service that led him to go through with the Sarajevo program in the first place. “Fears and precautions paralyze your life,” Franz once told a legal adviser, adding that he would rather put his trust in God than live “in a bell jar” worrying over the next nationalist assassin.
That fateful day, Franz Ferdinand and his wife, Sophie, were in an open-air sports car with the top folded down. Meanwhile, the seven members of The Black Hand fanned out along Appel Quay, a main avenue in Sarajevo running parallel to the Miljacka River.
The motorcade of six cars passed by two assassins who failed to act. As the motorcade approached Čabrinović, who was placed third on the route, he asked which car carried the archduke. After being informed that Franz Ferdinand was in the third car, Čabrinović threw his bomb at the car, only to watch it bounce off the folded-up roof at the back of the car and roll underneath the next car in the motorcade, then explode. Two army officers and several bystanders were wounded, but Franz Ferdinand and Sophie were essentially unharmed.
Čabrinović swallowed his cyanide pill and jumped into the Miljacka River. His suicide attempt, however, failed as the old cyanide only induced vomiting, and the Miljacka was only 5 inches (13cm) deep due to the hot dry summer.
Police dragged Čabrinović out of the river and he was severely beaten by the crowd.
As the police led Čabrinović away, he shouted, “I am a Serbian hero!”
There is no heroism in murder, only cowardice.
The procession sped away towards the Town Hall leaving the disabled car behind. Cvjetko Popović, Gavrilo Princip, and Trifun Grabež failed to act as the motorcade passed them at high speed.
Arriving at the Town Hall for a scheduled reception, Franz Ferdinand interrupted a prepared speech of welcome by the Mayor to protest, “Mr. Mayor, I came here on a visit and I am greeted with bombs. It is outrageous!” Franz had to wait as his own speech, still wet with blood from being in the damaged car, was brought to him. To the prepared text he added a few remarks about the day’s events and thanked the people of Sarajevo for their ovations “as I see them an expression of their joy at the failure of the attempt of assassination.”
Officials had to decide what to do next. The Archduke’s Chamberlain, Baron Rumerskirch, proposed that the couple remain at the Town Hall until troops could be brought into the city to line the streets. Governor-General Oskar Potiorek vetoed this suggestion on the grounds that soldiers coming straight from maneuvers would not have the dress uniforms appropriate for such duties, adding, “Do you think that Sarajevo is full of assassins?”
Instead of continuing their planned program, Franz Ferdinand decided to go visit the wounded from the bombing at the hospital. In order to ensure the safety of the couple, General Oskar Potiorek decided that the imperial motorcade should travel straight along the Appel Quay to the Sarajevo Hospital so that they could avoid the crowded city center. However, Potiorek failed to communicate this to the drivers. The reason for this is because his aide was in the hospital and was thus unable to notify the drivers. Furthermore, the Sarajevo Chief of Police, Edmund Gerle, who had repeatedly warned Potiorek of insufficient security precautions for the imperial visit, was asked by one of Franz’s aides to tell the drivers of the new route, but in the confusion and tensions of the moment, he neglected to do so.
After learning that the first assassination attempt was unsuccessful, Princip decided to move position and stand in front of a food shop, Schiller’s Delicatessen, near the Latin Bridge.
Franz Ferdinand and Sophie were once again the third car in the motorcade. The first two cars made a right turn at the Latin Bridge, so their driver did the same. Governor Potiorek, who was sharing the third car with the royal couple called out to the driver to stop because he was going the wrong way. The driver hit the brakes and when he attempted to put the car in reverse, he accidentally stalled the engine close to where Princip was standing. Princip pulled out his Browning pistol and fired two shots at point-blank range. The first bullet wounded Franz Ferdinand in the jugular. The second bullet hit Sophie in the stomach. Sophie immediately lost consciousness and collapsed onto Franz Ferdinand’s legs as the driver hit the gas and sped away. Speeding toward Governor Potiorek’s residence to get medical treatment, Franz Ferdinand said to his mortally wounded unconscious wife, “Sophie, Sophie! Don’t die! Live for our children!”
Princip tried to shoot himself, but was apprehended by bystanders before he was able to.
As they drove to Governor Potiorek’s residence, Franz Ferdinand was repeatedly asked about his wound, to which he replied 7 times, “It is nothing.” Unfortunately, for him, it was something. These utterances were followed by a violent choking sound caused by hemorrhage. Sophie died sometime during the drive to Governor Potiorek’s and was declared dead on arrival. Archduke Franz Ferdinand lost consciousness while driving to the Governor’s residence and died 10 minutes after arriving. The imperial couple were dead by 11:30am on June 28, 1914.
All of the conspirators were eventually found and arrested.
Princip would later say that when he shot Sophie he was actually aiming at Governor Potiorek.
Because Gavrilo Princip and Nedjelko Čabrinović were not yet 20-years-old they could not be given the death penalty. They both were given the punishment of 20 years in prison, but they both died of Tuberculosis while in prison. Čabrinović died in 1916 and Princip died in 1918. Three of the conspirators were hanged to death on February 3rd, 1915. Others were given prison time.
With the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir apparent to the throne of Austria-Hungary by young Serbian nationalists, Germany and Austria-Hungary got the spark, or maybe more adequately described, the excuse they were looking for to start a war against Serbia.
Knowing that Russia was a Serbian ally, Austria-Hungary was afraid to declare war on Serbia without help from Germany. A week after Franz Ferdinand’s murder, the Austrian Foreign Ministry sent an envoy to Berlin who carried a memorandum from the Austrian Foreign Secretary and a personal letter from Austro-Hungarian Emperor Franz Joseph to the Emperor of Germany, Kaiser Wilhelm II. Austria-Hungary expressed the need for specific action in the tumultuous Balkans region, pointed to increased Serbian and Russian aggression, and stated as an objective the elimination of Serbia as “a factor of political power in the Balkans.”
Kaiser Wilhelm II was outraged by the murder of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and felt a sense of personal loss: the two had met at the Archduke’s country estate just two weeks before the assassination to discuss the situation in the Balkans.
Though Kaiser Wilhelm II initially demurred and said he needed to consult the German Chancellor, he eventually promised “faithful support” for Austria-Hungary in whatever action it chose against to take toward Serbia, even if Russia intervened.
The Kaiser’s pledge, which historians refer to as the Carte Blanche or “Blank Check” assurance, was crucial to the beginning of World War I. Without promised support from Germany, Austria-Hungary likely would have never declared war on Serbia and risked fighting against their powerful allies (Russia, France, and Great Britain) all alone. What would have remained a localized conflict in the Balkans was about to explode into a European war.
On July 28, 1914, one month to the day after Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated, Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia.
British Naval Officer, Winston Churchill wrote to his wife at midnight on July 29th, “My darling one and beautiful, everything tends toward catastrophe and collapse.” He was proven right over the next several days. Russia began to mobilize to help Serbia. Germany demanded Russia halt, but Russia refused. On August 1st, Germany declared war on Russia. France ordered its own general mobilization on August 1st, and on August 3rd, France and Germany declared war on each other. The German army’s planned invasion of neutral Belgium, announced on August 4th, prompted Britain to declare war on Germany. Thus, in the summer of 1914, the major powers of the Western world—with the exception of the U.S. and Italy, both of which declared neutrality, at least for the time being, flung headlong into World War I.
World War I would see the Allies (also known as the Entente): France, United Kingdom, Russia, Italy, Japan and eventually the United States fighting against the Central Powers: Germany, Austria-Hungary, the Ottoman Empire, and Bulgaria.
The military technology of World War I would see important innovations to the machine gun, grenade, and artillery; while submarines, poison gas, warplanes, and tanks would be introduced for the first time.
Trench warfare, in which opposing armed forces attack, counterattack, and defend from relatively permanent systems of trenches dug into the ground, would be a major staple of World War I.
At the beginning of World War I, Germany hoped to avoid fighting on two fronts by quickly knocking France out then turning and fighting against Russia.
After invading neutral Belgium and advancing into northeastern France by the end of August 1914, German forces were nearing Paris, spurred on by punishing victories that forced five French armies into retreat after the Battles of the Frontiers at Lorraine, Ardennes, Charleroi, and Mons.
General Alexander von Kluck, at the head of the German 1st Army, was disobeying orders from German military headquarters to double back and support General Karl von Bülow’s 2nd Army. Not wanting to subordinate himself to Bülow’s command, Kluck ordered his forces to proceed in their pursuit of the retreating French 5th Army.
On September 4th, Helmuth von Moltke, chief of the German general staff, learned that Kluck had disobeyed orders, and that his troops—exhausted and depleted of resources, having outrun their supply lines due to their rapid advance—had crossed the Marne. Moltke ordered that the march of the 1st and 2nd German Armies towards Paris be halted in order to face any threat from that direction.
The order came too late.
On the morning of September 6th, 150,000 soldiers from the French 6th Army attacked the right flank of the German 1st Army, whose turn to meet the attack opened a 30-mile gap between Germany’s 1st Army and 2nd Army. Acting quickly, the French 5th Army and divisions of the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) poured into the gap and simultaneously attacked the German 2nd Army.
In total, 980,000 French and 100,000 British soldiers assaulted 750,000 German soldiers on September 6.
Fierce fighting continued for the next several days. The French Armies managed to hold their ground by getting 6,000 reinforcements on September 7.
On the night of September 8th, France’s 5th Army made a surprise attack on Germany’s 2nd Army and widened the gap.
On September 9th, Moltke ordered a general German retreat. Over the next few days, Allies slowly pushed the Germans back towards the Aisne River, where Germany’s 1st and 2nd Armies dug in, beginning the entrenchment of positions that would last well into 1918.
Germany was hoping to get a quick and decisive victory over the French so they could then focus fighting against Russia in the East. The significance of the Battle of the Marne is that the Allies pushed Germany back to a long, drawn-out stalemate that would make them have to fight on two fronts. Having to fight a war on two fronts against powerful enemies for an extended period of time would ultimately lead to the Germans demise.
Casualties at the First Battle of the Marne:
French: 250,000 of which 80,000 were killed
British: 12,733 of which 1,700 were killed
German: 298,000 of which 67,700 were killed
German General Erich von Falkenhayn believed that the war would be won or lost in France, and he felt that a strategy of attrition was Germany’s best hope to achieving its goals. In a letter to German Emperor Wilhelm II in late 1915, he argued that Britain was the most formidable of the Allied powers, but he conceded that it could not be assaulted directly, save by submarine warfare, as the British sector of the Western Front did not lend itself to offensive operations (an assessment that would prove to be correct at The First Battle of the Somme). In Falkenhayn’s view, Britain’s “real weapons” in the war were the French, Russian, and Italian armies. He regarded Russia as already paralyzed and Italy as unlikely to affect the outcome of the war, concluding, “Only France remains.”
Falkenhayn convinced Kaiser Wilhelm II, over the objections of other military leaders, that in combination with unrestricted submarine warfare at sea, a major French loss in battle would push the British out of the war.
Falkenhayn stated that a breakthrough en masse was unnecessary and that instead Germany should bleed the French to death by choosing a point of attack “for the retention of which the French would be compelled to throw in every man they have.”
The chosen mark of Falkenhayn’s offensive was the fortress city of Verdun, on the Meuse River in France. The city was selected because in addition to its symbolic importance—it was the last stronghold to fall in 1870 during the Franco-Prussian war—it threatened the main German communication lines and it was possible to attack the fortress city from three sides, which made it a good strategic target.
Ignoring intelligence that warned of a possible German attack in the region, French command had begun to strip its forces at Verdun of the heavy artillery essential to defensive warfare, choosing instead to focus on an offensive strategy dubbed Plan XVII.
Their hasty efforts to bolster the defenses of Verdun were almost too late. For 10 days, thousands of men were moved to Verdun to oppose the German attack.
At 7:15 am on February 22nd, the Germans commenced a massive bombardment of a front some 25 miles (40km) long. German troops made significant gains the first day, penetrating the French first line of defenses. The following day, the Germans capitalized on their gains by repelling a French attack and taking three more villages. On day 3, the German line swept through the second rank of French defenses, capturing several more villages and advancing on the key fort at Douaumont.
Within the first four days of the battle, the French forward positions suffered over 60 percent casualties; German losses were almost as heavy.
On February 25th, German forces approached Fort Douaumont, the most sprawling of the several dozen French bastions surrounding Verdun. Douaumont would have been all but impregnable under normal circumstances, but its garrison had been reduced to just 57 men in the months before the battle. After gaining access to the fort through an undefended passage, a small party of Germans led by Lieutenant Eugen Radtke was able to wander its subterranean chambers and round up French defenders one after the other. They soon captured the entire fort without suffering a single casualty or firing a single shot. News of Douaumont’s fall was met with impromptu celebrations and even a school holiday in Germany, and came as a severe blow to the already wounded French morale. It would take eight months and tens of thousands of casualties before the French finally recaptured the fort in October 1916.
The battle settled into a stalemate, as casualties mounted swiftly on both sides.
Rumbles from the barrages were heard as far as 100 miles away, and soldiers described certain hills as being so heavily bombed that they gushed fire like volcanoes. Those lucky enough to survive were often left with severe shell shock from the constant drumroll of falling bombs.
Notwithstanding all this, though fighting in desperate situations and losing many men, the French remained resilient. The French commander in the region, Henri-Philippe Petain, was determined to inflict the maximum amount of damage on the German forces, famously pledging to his Commander-In-Chief, “They shall not pass.”
Germany seized command of the skies during the early stages of the battle, but the tables turned after the French assembled a force of 226 planes and organized them into some of history’s first fighter squadrons. One of the most storied was the Lafayette Squadron, an outfit composed largely of American pilots even though the U.S. wouldn’t enter the war for another year. Lafayette pilots chalked up some three-dozen aerial victories, most of them during five months of intermittent service at Verdun.
Main rail lines to Verdun had been cut or were under constant barrage by German artillery, so French officers organized a motorized supply chain on an unprecedented scale, transporting men and military equipment to the front in a fleet of more than 3,000 trucks. The 37-mile (57-km) dirt road connecting the railhead at Bar-le-Duc to Verdun came to be known as La Voie Sacrée (The Sacred Way) for its critical role in the French defense.
While the Germans retained the initiative at Verdun and the situation became increasingly dire for the French, German efforts were frustrated by events nearly 1,000 miles (1,600 km) away. On June 4th, Russian General Aleksei Brusilov launched a devastating offensive in Lutsk (now in Ukraine) that quickly led to the capture of a very large number of Austro-Hungarian troops. This forced Germany to divert attention to the Eastern Front when victory seemed imminent at Verdun.
On June 24th, the British launched an attack on the Somme. The Germans had to respond and this caused the German forces at Verdun to be stretched even thinner.
The fighting continued, and in September, General Charles Mangin, who was an effective French military strategist, proposed a scheme to liberate the Verdun region. The offensive was initiated on October 21st with an artillery barrage across a broad front. An infantry assault followed on October 24th, with three divisions advancing behind a creeping artillery barrage. By that evening, the French had retaken Douaumont along with 6,000 German prisoners, and by November 2nd the fort at Vaux was once again in French hands. General Charles Mangin’s commitment to offensive warfare at any cost to the lives of his men earned him the nickname, “The Butcher.”
In order to exploit their success, General Mangin and the French began an attack at 10am on December 15th that spanned a 6-mile (10-km) front on the right bank, with the intention of retaking in one blow the whole of the former second French line, which had been lost on February 24th. The German counterbarrage started two minutes too late, and four French divisions assailed German lines. By nightfall they had retaken Poivre Hill. Over the next several days, the French recaptured more territory. This engagement was completed on December 18th with the recapture of Chambrettes and the capture of over 11,000 German prisoners.
With the Germans getting pushed back essentially to where they started the battle, the German high command finally called a stop to the German attacks after 10 long months thus ending the longest and one of the bloodiest battles of World War I.
One French soldier, whose unit fell victim to a German artillery attack at Verdun spoke of the horrors he and the men in his unit endured, “I arrived there with 175 men. I left with 34, several half-mad . . . not replying anymore when I spoke to them.”
Casualties at Verdun:
French: 377,231 with 162,440 dead
German: 337,000 with 143,000 dead
Since artillery blasts buried many of the fallen or rendered their remains unidentifiable, most of the recovered boned and bodies have since been placed in the Douaumont Ossuary, a sobering memorial that contains the mixed remains of between 130,000-150,000 French and German soldiers.
In life, their lives were intertwined in fighting each other to the death. In death, their bones would not be divided.
Nine villages were entirely destroyed. After the war, they were memorialized as having “died for France” and, although uninhabited, continue to be administered by volunteer mayors to preserve their existence as administrative entities.
An area covering some 65 square miles (170 square km) on the Verdun ridge was declared a Zone Rouge (“Red Zone”) because of the presence of unexploded ordnance, and development within it was prohibited. In the 21st century, the French Interior Ministry estimated that over 10 million shells remained in the soil around Verdun, and bomb-clearing units continued to remove some 40 tons of unexploded munitions from the area annually. Especially dangerous were chemical rounds, which were largely indistinguishable from explosive shells: their contents retained their toxicity over time, and they were prone to leak when discovered and handled. It was estimated that at existing rates of clearance, the deminers would be uncovering and disposing of ordnance in the Verdun area for centuries to come.
Verdun had serious strategic implications for the rest of the war. The Allies planned to defeat Germany through a series of large coordinated offensives, but the German attack at Verdun drastically reduced the number of French troops available. Britain and its Empire would have to lead the “Big Push” on the Western Front.
Named after the Russian commander, General Aleksei Brusilov, the Brusilov Offensive was the largest Russian assault in World War I and one of the deadliest in history.
France’s situation at Verdun was dire and they pleaded with the other Allies, Britain and Russia, to mount offensives to force Germany to divert resources and attention away from the struggle at Verdun.
While many Russian generals felt an offensive would be futile, General Brusilov insisted that—with surprise and adequate preparation—it could succeed. His troops were trained in full-size replicas of the positions they were to attack, artillery was sighted using air reconnaissance, and secrecy was strictly maintained.
On June 4th, Brusilov’s troops began their attacks on the Eastern Front on the Austro-Hungarian 4th Army at the city of Lutsk (now in Ukraine) with an impressive bombardment along a 200-mile-long (320km) front stretching from the Pripet marshes to the Bukovina region to the Southwest, in the foothills of the Carpathian Mountains. Though the Austrian troops at Lutsk outnumbered the Russians—200,000 men against 150,000—the success of the barrage obliterated this advantage, along with the Austrian front line, as Brusilov’s troops swept forward, taking 26,000 troops in one day.
Within two days, the Russians had broken the Austro-Hungarian 4th Army advancing 46 miles (75km) along a 12-mile-long (20km) front. Some 130,000 casualties plus the capture of over 200,000 prisoners forced Austria-Hungary to close down an offensive against Italy in the Trentino region and send divisions back east. On June 15th, Austria-Hungary told German General Erich von Falkenhayn that they were facing the greatest crisis of the war so far—a fact that took Falkenhayn, who was optimistic about an imminent French surrender at Verdun, completely by surprise. Confronted with Austro-Hungarian panic against Russia, Falkenhayn was forced to release four German divisions from the west, a weakness that allowed a successful French counterattack at Verdun on June 23rd, just one day before the preliminary British artillery bombardment began at the Somme.
German forces stabilized the Eastern Front. By September, Russian resources began to run out and the Brusilov Offensive reached its limits. It was shut down on September 20th.
According to the total losses and forces of the parties, the Brusilov Offensive was the largest Battle in World War I. It is considered one of the most lethal offensives in history. It inflicted irreparable losses on the Austro-Hungarian Army, and induced Romania to finally enter the war on the side of the Allies. The human and material losses on the Russian side greatly contributed to the Russian Revolution the following year.
Moreover, a permanently debilitated Austria-Hungary never again played a significant role in the war. Its army was reduced to holding trenches against the weaker Italians, and Germany was left to fight virtually alone for the final two years of World War I.
Russia: 500,000-1,000,000 with at least 62,155 dead
Austria-Hungary: 1,000,000-1,500,000 (including 400,000 taken prisoner)
Germany: 350,000
Ottoman: 12,000
Prior to the attack, the Allies launched a week-long heavy artillery bombardment, using some 1.5-1.75 million shells, which aimed to destroy German defenses, guns, and trenches, and to cut the barbed wire guarding the German trench defenses.
The problem that faced the British Commander-In-Chief Douglas Haig was, fundamentally, that of “storming a fortress . . . it must be confessed that the problem was not appreciated at G.H.Q. (General Headquarters).” Instead, “the failures of the past were put down to reasons other than the stout use of the machine-gun by the enemy and his scientifically-planned defenses.” Thus was produced an atmosphere of false confidence. It encouraged Haig to gamble on a breakthrough. Commander of the British 4th Army, Sir Henry Rawlinson repeatedly assured his subordinates that the bombardment would swamp all resistance and that “the infantry would only have to walk over and take possession.”
Haig even wrote on the eve of the attack: “I feel that every step in my plan has been taken with the Divine help.”
Rawlinson assured Haig he would loyally carry out his instructions, but privately he was convinced they were based on false premises, and on too great optimism.
Many of the fired shells were shrapnel, which threw out steel balls when they exploded. The problem was, though these were devastating against troops in the open, they were largely ineffective against concrete dugouts.
Another problem was many of the German trenches were deep underground and a lot stronger than anticipated.
Thirdly, a lot of shells were defective. Estimates suggest that at least 30 percent of the shells fired in the bombardment before the Battle of the Somme failed to explode.
Ultimately, the German defenses were not destroyed and in many places the wire remained uncut, but the British military leaders wouldn’t know this until it was too late.
On the morning of July 1st, 11 divisions of the British 4th Army—many of them volunteer soldiers going into battle for the first time—began advancing on a 15-mile (24km) front north of the Somme River in France. At the same time, five French divisions advanced on an 8-mile (12km) front to the south where the German defenses were weaker.
The question that remained was whether the British infantry could cross No-Man’s-Land before the barrage lifted. It was a race with death run by nearly 60,000 troops. The whole mass, made up of closely packed waves of men, was to be launched together, without determining whether the bombardment had really paralyzed the resistance. Under the British 4th Army’s instructions, those waves were to advance at “a steady pace” symmetrically aligned, like rows of bowling pins ready to be knocked over. “The necessity of crossing No-Man’s-Land at a good pace, so as to reach the parapet before the enemy could reach it, was not mentioned.” Yet to do so would have been physically impossible, for “the infantryman was so heavily laden that he could not move faster than a walk.” Each man carried about 66lbs (30kg) of equipment, a load that often amounted to more than half the soldier’s own body weight, “which made it difficult to get out of a trench, impossible to move much quicker than a slow walk, or to rise and lie down quickly.”
All-in-all, the British troops were unable to keep up with the barrage that was supposed to take them to the German trenches. This gave the Germans time to scramble out of their dugouts, man their trenches, and open fire. The British 4th Army was met by a storm of machine-gun, rifle, and artillery fire. They suffered over 57,000 casualties that first day, with 19,240 killed.
One man who was there, Lieutenant Alfred Bundy, described the scene, “Went over top . . . after an interminable period of terrible apprehension. Our artillery seemed to increase in intensity and the German guns opened up on No-Man’s-Land. The din was deafening, the fumes choking and visibility limited owing to the dust and clouds caused by exploding shells. It was a veritable inferno. I was momentarily expecting to be blown to pieces. My platoon continued to advance in good order without many casualties and had reached half way to the Boche line. Suddenly . . . an appalling rifle and machine-gun fire opened against us and my men commenced to fall. I shouted ‘down’ but most of those that were still not hit had already taken cover. I dropped in a shell hole and occasionally attempted to move to my right and left but bullets were forming an impenetrable barrage and exposure of the head meant certain death. None of our men was visible, but in all directions came pitiful groans and cries of pain.”
Although the French made good progress in the south and there were some local successes, in most places the attack was a terrible failure. But with the French still under pressure at Verdun, there was no question of calling off the offensive.
British Field Marshal Douglas Haig was determined to press on with the offensive, and over the next two weeks, the British launched a series of smaller attacks on the German line, putting increasing pressure on the Germans and forcing them to divert some weapons and soldiers from the Battle of Verdun.
Early on the morning of July 15th, British troops launched another artillery barrage followed by a massive attack, this time on the Bazentin Ridge, in the northern part of the Somme. The assault took the Germans by surprise, and the British were able to advance 6,000 yards (5,400m) into enemy territory, occupying the village of Longueval. But any small advance continued to come at the expense of heavy casualties in this long and deadly war of attrition.
On September 15th, during an attack at Flers Courcelette, the British artillery barrage was followed by an advance of 12 divisions of soldiers accompanied by 48 Mark I tanks, making their first-ever appearance on the battlefield. But the tanks were still early in their development stages, and many of them broke down before making it to the front line. Though the British were able to advance some 1.5 miles (2.4km), they sustained some 29,000 casualties and fell short of a true breakthrough.
As October began, bad weather stymied another Allied attack, with soldiers struggling to cross muddy terrain under fierce fire from German artillery and fighter planes. The Allies made their final advance of the battle in mid-November, attacking the German positions in the Ancre River Valley.
With the arrival of true winter weather, Haig finally called the offensive to a halt on November 18th, ending the bloody battle of attrition on the Somme, at least until the following year. Over 141 days, the British had advanced just 7 miles (11km) and had failed to break the German line.
For many, the battle exemplified the “futile” slaughter and military incompetence of the First World War. Yet Haig had no option but to fight on the Somme. And despite his controversial tactics, the battle provided a tough lesson in how to fight a large-scale war. A more professional and effective army emerged from the battle. And the tactics developed there, including the use of tanks and creeping barrages, laid some of the foundations of the Allies’ successes in 1918.
Casualties:
British: 420,000 with 95,675 dead
German: 450,000 with 164,055 dead
French: 200,000 with 50,729 dead
At the beginning of World War I, U.S. President Woodrow Wilson proclaimed America’s neutrality, stating the nation “must be neutral in fact as well as in name during these days that are to try men’s souls.”
Though many Americans supported this position, American companies, however, continued to ship food, raw materials and munitions to both the Allies and Central Powers, although trade between the Central Powers and the United States was severely curtailed by Britain’s naval blockade of Germany. U.S. banks also provided the warring nations with loans, the bulk of which went to the Allies.
On May 7th, 1915, a German submarine sank the British ocean liner Lusitania, resulting in the deaths of nearly 1,200 people, including 128 Americans. The incident strained diplomatic relations between Washington and Berlin and began to turn public opinion against Germany.
After this, a new Preparedness Movement proclaimed that the U.S. needed to immediately build up strong naval and land forces for defensive purposes. Interventionists, like former president Theodore Roosevelt, rallied to shape public opinion. “Preparedness against war does not invariably avert war, any more than a fire department in a city will invariably prevent a fire, and there are well-meaning, foolish people who point out this fact as offering an excuse for unpreparedness.”
In March 1916, a German U-boat torpedoed a French passenger ship, Sussex, killing dozens of people, including several Americans. Afterward, the United States threatened to cut diplomatic ties with Germany. In response, the Germans issued the Sussex pledge, promising to stop attacking merchant and passenger ships without warning.
In November of 1916, President Woodrow Wilson won a close re-election under the slogan “He Kept Us Out of War.”
By 1917, with Belgium and Northern France occupied, with Russia experiencing political upheaval, and with the remaining Entente nations low on credit, Germany appeared to have the upper hand in Europe. However, a British economic embargo and naval blockade were causing severe shortages of fuel and food in Germany. Berlin then decided to resume unrestricted submarine warfare. The aim was to break the transatlantic supply chain to Britain from other nations, although the German high command realized that sinking American-flagged ships would almost certainly bring the United States into the war.
So why would the German leadership take such a big risk?
“It was a gamble, which was very likely to hurt them in the long run,” explains University of Rochester associate professor of political science Hein Goemans. “They thought the gamble would open up a window of opportunity in which they could defeat the British. If they defeated the British, then they could prevent Americans from coming to the mainland and they would have a victorious end to the war.”
The Germans had seen how long it had taken the British soldiers from the time they arrived in France until the time they were ready for a major offensive at the Somme. The Germans calculated correctly that it would take the Americans at least as long to get their troops across the sea and ready to fight.
During February and March of 1917, German U-boats sank a series of U.S. merchant ships, resulting in multiple casualties. The U.S. protested and severed diplomatic relations with Germany, while Congress appropriated funds for increased military affairs.
Meanwhile, in January 1917, the British intercepted and deciphered an encrypted message from German Foreign Minister Arthur Zimmermann to the German minister in Mexico, Heinrich von Eckhart. The Zimmermann telegram proposed an alliance between Germany and Mexico if America joined the war on the side of the Allies.
As part of the arrangement, the Germans would support the Mexicans in regaining the territory they’d lost in the Mexican-American War—Texas, New Mexico and Arizona. Additionally, Germany wanted Mexico to help convince Japan to come over to its side in the conflict.
The British gave President Wilson the Zimmermann telegram on February 24, and on March 1 the American press reported on its existence. The American public was outraged by the news of the Zimmermann telegram and it, along with Germany’s resumption of submarine attacks on American merchant ships, helped lead to the United States joining the war.
President Wilson asked Congress for “a war to end all wars” that would “make the world safe for democracy.” Congress voted to declare war on Germany on April 6th, 1917. The U.S. would later declare war on Austria-Hungary.
In May, Congress passed the Selective Service Act, which reinstated the draft for the first time since the Civil War and led to some 2.8 million men being inducted into the U.S. military by the end of World War I. Around 2 million more Americans voluntarily served in the armed forces during the conflict.
The entry of the United States was the turning point of the war, because it made the eventual defeat of Germany possible. It had been foreseen in 1916 that if the United States went to war, the Allies’ military effort against Germany would be upheld by U.S. supplies and by enormous extensions of credit. These expectations were amply and decisively fulfilled. The United States’ production of armaments was to meet not only its own needs but also France’s and Great Britain’s. In this sense, the American economic contribution alone was decisive.
The American military contribution was as important as the economic one. By July 1917, there were already 35 U.S. destroyers stationed at Queenstown (Cobh) on the coast of Ireland—enough to supplement British destroyers for a really effective transatlantic convoy system. By the end of the war there were more than 380 U.S. craft stationed overseas.
Furthermore, the U.S. declaration of war set an example to other states in the Western Hemisphere. Cuba, Panama, Haiti, Brazil, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, and Honduras were all at war with Germany by the end of July 1918.
Even though many months were required for the raising, training, and dispatch to Europe of an expeditionary force, there were still only 85,000 U.S. troops in France when the Germans launched their last great offensive in March 1918; but there were 1.2 million there by the following September.
When the war concluded in November 1918, more than 2 million U.S. troops had served at the Western Front in Europe, and more than 50,000 of them died.
In the early 1900s, Russia was one of the most impoverished countries in Europe with an enormous peasantry and a growing minority of poor industrial workers. Much of Western Europe viewed Russia as an undeveloped, backwards society.
A population boom at the end of the 19th century, a harsh growing season due to Russia’s northern climate, and a series of costly wars—starting with the Crimean War—created frequent food shortages across the vast empire. Moreover, a famine in 1891-1892 is estimated to have killed up to 400,000 Russians.
The devastating Russo-Japanese War of 1904-1905 further weakened Russia and the position of ruler Czar Nicholas II. Russia suffered heavy losses of soldiers, ships, money and international prestige in the war, which it ultimately lost.
Large protests by Russian workers against the monarchy led to the Bloody Sunday massacre of 1905. Hundreds of unarmed protesters were killed or wounded by the czar’s troops. The Bloody Sunday massacre sparked the Russian Revolution of 1905, during which angry workers responded with a series of crippling strikes throughout the country. Farm laborers and soldiers joined the cause, leading to the creation of worker-dominated councils called “Soviets.”
After the bloodshed of 1905 and Russia’s humiliating loss in the Russo-Japanese War, Czar Nicholas Romanov II promised greater freedom of speech and the formation of a representative assembly, or Duma, to work toward reform.
However, Nicholas repeatedly dissolved the Duma when it opposed his will.
Militarily, imperial Russia was no match for industrialized Germany, and Russian casualties were greater than those sustained by any nation in any previous war. Food and fuel shortages plagued Russia as inflation mounted. The already weak economy was hopelessly disrupted by the costly war effort.
Russian factories simply couldn’t produce enough arms and ammunition to equip the Czar’s 1.4 million-man army. At the start of the war, the Russians had 800,000 men in uniform who didn’t even have rifles to train with, and those who did often had to make do with obsolete weapons that were nearly 40 years old, according to Jamie H. Cockfield’s 1999 book, With Snow on Their Boots. Some soldiers had to go into battle unarmed until they could pick up a rifle from another soldier who had been killed or wounded. And Russia’s output of bullets initially was just 13,000 rounds a day, so they had to make every shot count.
Furthermore, Czar Nicholas left the Russian capital of St. Petersburg (The Russians changed the name of the imperial city in 1914 to Petrograd because “St. Petersburg” sounded too German) to take command of the Russian Army front.
The problem was Czar Nicholas II didn’t have the training or experience to lead the Russian military.
“He fancied himself a military strategist, but he was not,” says Mayhill Fowler, a Russian, Eastern European and Eurasian Studies professor at Stetson University. As she notes, Nicholas disregarded a prewar memorandum from one of his advisors, warning that in the event of a defeat by Germany, “social revolution in its most extreme form is inevitable.”
It also didn’t help that when Nicholas left Petrograd to join the troops, he left behind his German wife, Czarina Alexandra, whose brusque demeanor and distaste for Russian culture made her unpopular with the Russian populace.
In her husband’s absence, Czarina Alexandra assumed nominal control of the empire and began firing elected officials.
During this time, she heavily relied on Grigori Rasputin as an adviser. Rasputin was a peasant monk who was later given the nickname “Mad Monk” and who gained influence over the Romanovs by healing their son, Alexei, from hemophilia, a rare disorder in which blood doesn’t properly clot. The czar’s sister, Grand Duchess Olga, later reported that Rasputin healed Alexei by kneeling at the foot of his bed and praying; the calming atmosphere that Rasputin created in the palace may have assisted with the boy’s recovery.
In addition, Rasputin insisted that the Czarina “not allow the doctors to bother [Alexei] too much.” At the time, medical knowledge was limited, even though drugs like aspirin were available for treatment. Aspirin, then considered a cure-all remedy, had the unknown side effect of thinning the blood, which would have exacerbated Alexei’s hemophilia symptoms. By stopping doctors from administering aspirin, Rasputin may have improved Alexei’s condition under what seemed to be miraculous circumstances.
Rasputin presented himself to the imperial court as a holy man, despite no formal affiliation with the Russian Orthodox Church. He also spoke as a self-appointed representative of the peasantry. But his behavior away from court offered a different portrait. Rasputin’s drunkenness and affairs with women of all social backgrounds, from prostitutes to society ladies, scandalized the public. He appeared to bask in his fame, showing off shirts embroidered for him by the empress and inviting her friends and servants to his home in Pokrovskoye. Rasputin’s wife appeared untroubled by his infidelities, commenting, “He has enough for all.”
The press, unshackled thanks to rights granted by Nicholas in 1905, spread lurid tales about Rasputin both within Russia and abroad. Rumors about Rasputin’s influence over the czarist regime spread throughout Europe. Soldiers on World War I’s Eastern Front spoke of Rasputin having an intimate affair with Alexandra, passing the story off as common knowledge without evidence.
Nicholas—described by historian Robert K. Massie as “a decent man but a bad czar”—stood by his wife, supporting her political decisions and rejecting calls for an alternative interim government.
Russian nobles, including Yusupov, a wealthy aristocrat who married into the Romanov family, believed that Rasputin’s removal would give Nicholas one last chance at restoring the reputation and prestige of the monarchy. With Rasputin gone, they hoped, the czar would return from military headquarters and once again govern from St. Petersburg, taking the advice of his extended family, the nobility, and the Duma—the Russian legislative body—instead of listening to Alexandra.
The best-known account of Rasputin’s murder appears in Yusupov’s memoirs, published in 1928. The prince claimed to have invited Rasputin to his palace to meet his wife, Irina (who was in fact away at the time), then served him a platter of cakes and numerous glasses of wine laced with toxic potassium cyanide. To Yusupov’s astonishment, Rasputin appeared to be unaffected by the poison. The desperate prince borrowed a revolver from Grand Duke Dmitri, the czar’s cousin, and shot Rasputin multiple times but was still unable to kill him. As Yusupov later wrote, “This devil who was dying of poison, who had a bullet in his heart, must have been raised from the dead by the powers of evil. There was something appalling and monstrous in his diabolical refusal to die.” Rumors that circulated in the immediate aftermath of Rasputin’s death suggested water was found in his lungs, indicating the “Mad Monk” had ultimately died by drowning.
Rasputin’s actual murder was probably far less dramatic. His daughter Maria, who fled Russia after the revolution and became a circus lion tamer wrote a 1929 book that condemned Yusupov’s actions and questioned the veracity of his account. Maria wrote that her father did not like sweets and never would have eaten a platter of cakes. In fact, the autopsy reports do not mention poison or drowning, instead concluding that Rasputin was shot in the head at close range. Yusupov transformed the murder into an epic struggle of good versus evil to sell books and bolster his own reputation.
The responses from the public were mixed, reflecting Rasputin’s checkered reputation. The elite, from whence Yusupov and his co-conspirators came, rejoiced and applauded the killers when they appeared in public. Nicholas banished Yusupov and Dmitri from court for their involvement in the plot, inadvertently saving the pair from the coming revolution. The peasantry mourned Rasputin as one of their own, seeing the murder as one more example of the nobility controlling Nicholas: When a peasant rose to a position of influence with the czar, he was murdered by wealthy men.
To the dismay of the conspirators, Rasputin’s murder did not lead to a radical change in Nicholas and Alexandra’s approach to governing.
To these emergent revolutionaries, Rasputin symbolized the corruption at the heart of the imperial court, and his murder was seen, rather accurately, as an attempt by the nobility to hold onto power at the continued expense of the working people. To the working class, Rasputin represented the broader problems with czarism. In the aftermath of the Russian Revolution, Provisional Government leader Alexander Kerensky went so far as to say, “Without Rasputin, there would have been no Lenin.”
Another major problem was that even though wartime Russia produced sufficient food during the war to feed its population, Russians still went hungry. Steven Miner, a history professor at Ohio University who specializes in Russia, the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe explains, “The problem was not production, but rather distribution and transport, which led to periodic shortages.” The inefficiency of the czarist state began to hollow out political support.
The Duma, Russia’s elected legislature, couldn’t do much about Nicholas’ mismanagement of the country, since he had the power to dissolve it if members dared to disagree with him. Even so, “prominent members wondered aloud if the recent decisions made by the czar’s government were the consequence of stupidity or treason,” says Lynne Hartnett, as associate professor of history at Villanova University and an expert on the Russian Revolution.
But Nicholas II somehow didn’t grasp just how bad of a situation he was in. As Hartnett notes, he clung to the belief that he and the Russian people had an unshakeable mystical bond. As the Czar saw things, Fowler explained, “his family had been in power for 300 years, and he was appointed by God.” His obliviousness is apparent in letters that he wrote to his wife, in which he mentions news of protests against his regime with mundane family matters. Fowler says, “He’s just not aware that his empire is in trouble.”
“Breadlines grew in many cities and most notably in the capital of Petrograd,” Hartnett explains. At the massive Putilov factory in Petrograd, workers went on strike in the early days of March, demanding higher wages to compensate for the high price of food. Rather than meeting the workers’ demands, the factory responded with a lockout, prompting thousands of workers to continue the strike.
A few days later, on International Women’s Day, tens of thousands of people marched in the streets of Petrograd, with striking factory workers joining forces with mothers who demanded food for their children. Three days into the protests, the czar’s officials ordered the military and police to break up the protests—using any means. The ensuing violence, says Harnett, claimed the lives of nearly 100. And on the next day, soldiers joined the demonstrators.
The army had enough. Czar Nicholas’ generals convinced him to step down. Three days later, Nicholas II abdicated (gave up the throne) in favor of his brother, Michael, who refused the crown.
The reign of the Romanovs was over.
This ushered in a period where two rival governments battled for control of the country: The Provisional Government and The Bolsheviks (from the Russian word “bolshinstvo” which means “majority”) led by Vladimir Lenin. The Provisional Government had been assembled by a group of leaders from Russia’s bourgeois capitalist class. Lenin instead called for a Soviet government that would be ruled directly by councils of soldiers, peasants and workers.
During this chaotic period, there were frequent mutinies, protests and strikes.
The Provisional Government attained the upper hand for a while. Some of the Bolshevik leaders were thrown into prison while Lenin went into hiding. Furthermore, the office of Pravda (Russian word that means “Truth”), the Bolshevik Party newspaper, was raided, and its printing presses were destroyed by a mob.
The Provisional Government was formally invested with full and sovereign power. In practice, however, it possessed no real power at all. The actual authority was held by the soviets in the cities and provincial towns; they openly defied the government and exercised, each in its area, legislative as well as executive powers.
Despite the virtually universal hatred of the war, the Provisional Government chose to continue fighting to support its allies, giving the Bolsheviks a justification to advance the revolution further.
Alexander Kerensky, head of the Provisional Government, engaged in a tour of the front, where he delivered impassioned speeches to the troops and declared that the country expected them to work a miracle. The soldiers listened to Kerensky, applauded him, and even swore to fight and to die for the revolution. The moment he left, however, they went back to their barracks and would not return to the trenches. Several regiments had to be disbanded for refusal to obey orders.
It was in this atmosphere that the Russian Army attacked Austro-German forces on June 18th (July 1st, New Style) along a broad front in Galicia and pushed toward Lviv (now in Ukraine). At first, the offensive proved remarkably successful. The Austrians were driven back and many prisoners and guns were taken. In just two weeks, however, any gains had been erased. A German counterattack shattered the Russian lines, and the army fled in disarray. As Lenin said, the Russian soldiers had “voted for peace with their legs.” Not only was the Russian army destroyed, but Russia had effectively ceased to exist as a great power.
With the paralyzing loss of the military, dire situations for food, and instability in the government, the whole country was in a state of feverish unrest, which soon developed into riots and anarchy. In the towns, bread riots broke out, and in the villages the demand was for land. In the countryside, peasants began expropriating land, driving off cattle, burning down landowners’ dwellings and barns, and demolishing agricultural machinery. Many of those landowners who did not flee were captured, tortured, and murdered. The peasants’ revolt was accompanied by a wave of crimes committed by bands of renegade soldiers who spread over the whole country robbing and killing.
Lenin appealed to the peasants and the working class with his slogan, “Peace, Land, Bread.” Thus, Lenin promised to cease war with Germany, give land to the peasantry, and end the wartime famine.
The Bolsheviks merged various workers’ militias loyal to them into the Red Guards, which would be strong enough to seize power.
On November 6th and 7th, 1917 (or October 24th and 25th on the Julian calendar, which is why the event is often referred to as the October Revolution), leftist revolutionaries led by Bolshevik Party leader Vladimir Lenin launched a nearly bloodless coup d’état against the Duma’s Provisional Government. The Bolsheviks and their allies occupied government buildings and other strategic locations in Petrograd, and soon formed a new government with Lenin as its head. Lenin became the dictator of the world’s first communist state.
On December 15th, 1917, led by the Bolsheviks, Russia signed an armistice with the Central Powers to quit fighting in the war.
Civil War broke out in Russia in late 1917 after the Bolshevik Revolution. The warring factions included the Red and White Armies. The Red Army fought for the Lenin’s Bolshevik government. The White Army represented a large group of loosely allied forces, including monarchists, capitalists and supporters of democratic socialism.
In March of 1918, the new Bolshevik government of Russia signed the Brest-Litovsk treaty with Germany, Austria-Hungary, the Ottoman Empire and Bulgaria, giving up a million square miles of its territory, a third of its population, a majority of its coal, oil, and iron stores, and much of its industry to appease the Germans. Lenin insisted that his Congress of Soviets accept the “shameful peace,” as he called it, “in order to save the world revolution” and “its only foothold — the Soviet Republic.”
The imperial family was held under guard for some months at Ekaterinburg, in the foothills of the Urals. The local soviet professed to believe that the imperial family was planning to escape to Omsk, where the “White” Admiral Aleksandr Kolchak had established a counterrevolutionary government. Without a trial, the soviet voted to execute “Citizen and Citizeness Romanov, their son and four daughters.” On July 16th, 1918, the former Czar, Nicholas Romanov II, together with his wife Alexandra, their son and four daughters were taken to the basement of the house where they had been confined. There they were shot and stabbed to death.
The Romanov murders were a dark foreboding of the atrocities to come under communism.
Nicholas II experienced the same as Caesarion, the son of Julius Caesar and Cleopatra who, after the defeat of Mark Antony and Cleopatra at Actium in 31 B.C, ran away toward India. Ultimately, Caesarion was persuaded to go back to Egypt where Octavian (the new Roman ruler) killed him.
The enduring lesson is that those who give up power or have it taken from them need to run as far and as fast as they can, because those who come into power will kill everyone who has claim on the throne.
The Russian Civil War ended in 1923 with Lenin’s Red Army claiming victory and establishing the Soviet Union while relocating the capital to Moscow. After many years of violence and political unrest, the Russian Revolution paved the way for the rise of communism as an influential political belief system around the world.
The Hundred Days Offensive, also known as the Advance to Victory, was a series of Allied successes in summer-fall of 1918 that pushed the German Army back to the battlefields of 1914.
After incurring heavy casualties during their ambitious spring 1918 offensive, the bulk of the German army was exhausted, and its morale was rapidly disintegrating amid a lack of supplies and the spreading influenza epidemic. Some of its commanders believed that the tide was turning irrevocably in favor of Germany’s enemies; as one of them, Crown Prince Rupprecht, wrote on July 20, “We stand at the turning point of the war: what I expected first for the autumn, the necessity to go over to the defensive, is already on us, and in addition all the gains which we made in the spring—such as they were—have been lost again.”
At a conference of national army commanders on July 24th, Allied generalissimo Ferdinand Foch rejected the idea of a single decisive blow against the Germans, favoring instead a series of limited attacks in quick succession aimed at liberating the vital railway lines around Paris and diverting the attention and resources of the enemy rapidly from one spot to another.
According to Foch: “These movements should be exacted with such rapidity as to inflict upon the enemy a succession of blows . . . These actions must succeed each other at brief intervals, so as to embarrass the enemy in the utilization of his reserves and not allow him sufficient time to fill up his units.” The national commanders—John J. Pershing of the United States, Philippe Petain of France and Sir Douglas Haig of Britain—willingly went along with this strategy, which effectively allowed each army to act as its own entity, striking smaller individual blows to the Germans instead of joining together in one massive coordinated attack.
Haig’s part of the plan called for a limited offensive at Amiens, on the Somme River, aimed at counteracting a German victory there the previous March.
The attacking force comprised the Canadian Corps, the British 4th Army, the French 1st Army, the Australian Corps, and others. In early August, the Allies made a show of weakening their front line so that German officers expected no assault. In reality, troops were being moved to the front at night, while bogus radio communication reinforced the deception. The Allied offensive would be supported by thousands of heavy and super-heavy field guns, more than 600 tanks, and 2,000 aircraft. The Germans were greatly outnumbered and, in the words of German military chief Erich Ludendorff, “depressed down to Hell.” The Germans were protected by three lines of trenches, which were poorly wired for communications and without good dugout shelters. Unlike earlier offensives, the Amiens assault would not be preceded by bombardment so as to preserve the element of surprise.
A Royal Air Force squadron laid smoke screens over the battlefield, and a heavy mist concealed no man’s land as the attack grew nearer. On August 8th at exactly 4:20 AM, 900 Allied guns opened fire and the infantry headed toward the German lines. The Germans were entirely unprepared for an attack of this scale, and many surrendered at the first chance. Allied soldiers fought through woods to clear German machine gun positions and take prisoners. The tanks lagged behind, struggling across the boggy terrain.
By the end of the day on August 8th, the Allies had penetrated German lines around the Somme with a gap some 15 miles long. Of the 27,000 German casualties on August 8th, an unprecedented proportion—12,000—had surrendered to the enemy.
The battle ended on August 11th as German resistance stiffened and Canadian commander Sir Arthur Currie urged the Allied leadership to consolidate the gains they had made thus far. In three days, the Allies had advanced some 8 miles (13 km), a huge achievement in a war characterized by minute gains at enormous cost.
Ludendorff described the opening day of the battle as “the black day of the German Army in the history of this war…Everything I had feared, and of which I had so often given warning, had here, in one place, become a reality.” When Ludendorff informed German emperor Kaiser Wilhelm II of the disaster at Amiens, Wilhelm replied, “We have reached the limits of our capacity. The war must be terminated.”
Yet the Kaiser believed that this end could not come until Germany was again making progress on the battlefield, so that there would be at least some bargaining room. Even faced with the momentum of the Allied summer offensive—later known as the Hundred Days Offensive—the front lines of the German army continued to fight on into the final months of the war, despite being plagued by disorder and desertion within its troops and rebellion on the home front.
Next, the Allies shifted their attack to a different part of the line. This new strategy contributed to the success of the offensive by continually stretching the German Army’s resources and manpower. The Allies continued to attack in this way throughout the summer and autumn of 1918, giving the increasingly exhausted and depleted German Army little respite. By the end of August, the Allies had notably captured Albert, Bapaume, Noyon and Peronne during the Second Battle of the Somme.
Built in late 1916, the Hindenburg Line—named by the British for the German commander-in-chief, Paul von Hindenburg; it was known to the Germans as the Siegfried Line—was a heavily fortified zone running several miles behind the active front between the north coast of France and Verdun, near the border of France and Belgium. By September 1918, the formidable system consisted of six defensive lines, forming a zone some 6,000 yards deep, ribbed with lengths of barbed wire and dotted with concrete emplacements, or firing positions. Though the entire line was heavily fortified, its southern part was most vulnerable to attack.
Australian, British, French and American forces participated in the attack on the line, which began with the marathon bombardment, using 1,637 guns along a 10,000-yard-long front. In the last 24 hours the British artillery fired a record 945,052 shells. After capturing the St. Quentin Canal with a creeping barrage of fire—126 shells for each 500 yards of German trench over an eight-hour period—the Allies were able to successfully breach the Hindenburg Line on September 29th.
The offensive was driven ahead by Australian and U.S. troops, who attacked the heavily fortified town of Bellicourt with tank, aircraft and artillery support. After four days of battle, with heavy losses on both sides, the Germans were forced to retreat. With Kaiser Wilhelm II pressured by the military into accepting governmental reform and Germany’s ally, Bulgaria, pleading for an armistice by the end of September, the Central Powers were in disarray on the battlefield as well as the home front.
By October 5th, the Allies had broken through the entire depth of the Hindenburg defenses over a 19 mi (31 km) front. General Rawlinson wrote, “Had the [Germans] not shown marked signs of deterioration during the past month, I should never have contemplated attacking the Hindenburg line. Had it been defended by the Germans of two years ago, it would certainly have been impregnable . . .”
On October 8th, the First and Third British Armies broke through the Hindenburg Line during the Second Battle of Cambrai. This collapse forced the German High Command to accept that the war had to be ended.
An armistice is a formal agreement of warring parties to stop fighting. It is not necessarily the end of a war, as it may constitute only a cessation of hostilities while an attempt is made to negotiate a lasting peace treaty.
Bulgaria signed the Armistice of Salonica (also known as the Armistice of Thessalonica) with the Allies on September 29th, 1918.
Under the Treaty of Neuilly-sur-Seine (November 1919), Bulgaria lost its Aegean coastline to Greece and nearly all of its Macedonian territory to the new state of Yugoslavia, and had to give Dobruja back to the Romanians.
The Ottoman Empire signed the Armistice of Mudros with the Allies on October 30th, 1918.
With this defeat, The Ottoman Empire disintegrated and was partitioned, with Turkey becoming its immediate successor.
Austria-Hungary signed the Armistice of Villa Giusti (also known as the Padua Armistice) with the Allies on November 3rd, 1918.
With this defeat, Austria-Hungary was dissolved into what would eventually become the separate countries of Austria and Hungary.
“An invasion of Germany would have required too much in terms of morale, logistics and resources,” explains Guy Cuthbertson of Liverpool Hope University and author of Peace at Last: A Portrait of Armistice Day, 11 November 1918. Beyond that, “where would it end? Berlin is a long way from France.” Instead, “There was a need to end the war as soon as possible as long as the Allies could achieve peace with victory.”
Germany’s political and military situation were weak enough that the Germans feared being conquered. Cuthbertson says, “Germany was suffering from starvation,” with the situation getting worse “by the hour.”
In fact, the Germans had started making overtures about an armistice in early October. At first, they tried to go through U.S. President Woodrow Wilson, fearing that the British and the French would insist upon harsh terms. But that didn’t succeed. According to Bullitt Lowry’s 1996 book Armistice 1918, the Germans finally sent a late-night radio message to Marshal Ferdinand Foch, commander-in-chief of the Allied forces, requesting permission to send a delegation through the lines to negotiate an armistice, and asked for a general cease-fire. Forty-five minutes later, Foch replied. He ignored the cease-fire request, but gave the Germans permission to come.
At 8:00 p.m. on November 7th, three automobiles carefully made their way through the nightmarish landscape of artillery craters and barbed wire in no-man’s land in northern France, as a German bugler sounded a truce and another soldier waved a white flag. The German envoys switched to a French car, then boarded a train, and traveled through the night. On the morning of November 8th, they pulled into a railroad siding in the Forest of Compiègne, alongside Foch’s railroad car. That was where the meeting would take place.
The task that awaited the German diplomats weighed heavily upon them. “There was the fear of national disgrace,” explains Nicholas Best, author of the 2008 book The Greatest Day in History. “Whoever proposed a laying-down of arms would be hated by militaristic Germans for the rest of his life.”
There wasn’t much of a negotiation. When the Germans asked if he had an Allied offer, Foch responded, “I have no proposals to make.” His instructions from the Allied governments were to simply present an as-is deal. French General Maxime Weygand then read the terms that the Allies had decided upon to the Germans.
According to Lowry’s account, the Germans became distraught when they heard that they would have to disarm, fearing that they’d be unable to defend their teetering government against communist revolutionaries. But they had little leverage.
In the early morning hours of November 11th, Matthias Erzberger and Ferdinand Foch met for the final negotiations. According to Lowry, the German emissary tried his best to persuade Foch to make the agreement less severe. Foch made a few small changes, including letting the Germans keep a few of their weapons. Finally, just before dawn, the agreement was signed.
On the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month of 1918, the incessant boom of artillery abruptly went silent along the Western Front in France.
An American medical officer, Stanhope Bayne-Jones, suddenly could hear water dripping off a bush next to him. “It seemed mysterious . . . unbelievable,” he later recalled, according to an account on the U.S. National Library of Medicine website. “All of the men knew what the silence meant, but nobody shouted or threw his hat in the air.” It took hours for the reality to sink in. World War I—the bloodiest conflict so far in human history, with more than 8.5 million military casualties—had finally ended.
The Germans agreed to pull their troops out of France, Belgium and Luxembourg within 15 days, or risk becoming prisoners of the Allies. They had to turn over their arsenal, including 5,000 artillery pieces, 25,000 machine guns and 1,700 airplanes, along with 5,000 railroad locomotives, 5,000 trucks and 150,000 wagons. Germany also had to give up the contested territory of Alsace-Lorraine. And they agreed to the indignity of Allied forces occupying German territory along the Rhine, where they would stay until 1930.
“The Allies wouldn’t have given Germany better terms because they felt that they had to defeat Germany and Germany could not be allowed to get away with it,” Cuthbertson said. “There’s also a sense that an armistice has to ensure that the enemy are not strong enough to start the war again any time soon.”
Matthias Erzberger, the German politician who reluctantly agreed to lead the German delegation, was murdered not quite three years later by German ultra-nationalist extremists.
November 11th itself would become a hallowed day. In 1919, President Wilson proclaimed the first Armistice Day, which in 1926 became a permanent legal holiday. The day is also now known as Remembrance Day in the Commonwealth of Nations. And in 1954, the U.S. Congress—at the urging of veterans’ organizations—changed its name to Veterans Day to honor service members who had served in World War II and the Korean War.
Kaiser Wilhelm II was forced to abdicate (give up) the throne of Germany by leaders of the army on November 9th, 1918. The next day he took a train to the Netherlands, which remained neutral throughout the war. He bought a manor house in the town of Doorn and remained there for the remainder of his life. Two decades later, Wilhelm II was shocked by the Nazis’ thuggish tactics and remarked that for the first time he was ashamed to be German.
After Kaiser Wilhelm II abdicated the throne in 1918, Germany would no longer be ruled by a king. Power was handed to a government led by the leader of the left-wing Social Democratic Party, Friedrich Ebert.
Thus World War I brought about the end of four empires: The German Empire, The Russian Empire, The Austro-Hungarian Empire, and The Ottoman Empire.
In a speech to Congress in January 1918, Wilson laid out his idealistic vision for the world after World War I. In addition to specific territorial settlements based on an Allied victory, Wilson’s so-called Fourteen Points emphasized the need for national self-determination for Europe’s different ethnic populations.
Wilson also proposed the founding of a “general association of nations” that would mediate international disputes and foster cooperation between different nations in the hopes of preventing war on such a large scale in the future. This organization eventually became known as the League of Nations.
When German leaders signed the armistice ending hostilities in World War I on November 11th, 1918, they believed Wilson’s vision would form the basis for any future peace treaty. This would not prove to be the case.
The “Big Four” leaders of the victorious Western nations—Wilson of the United States, David Lloyd George of Great Britain, Georges Clemenceau of France and, to a lesser extent, Vittorio Orlando of Italy—dominated the peace negotiations in Paris. Germany and the other defeated powers—Austria-Hungary, Bulgaria and Turkey—were not represented at the Paris Peace Conference. Also absent was Russia, who withdrew from the war in 1917.
The Big Four themselves had competing objectives in Paris: Clemenceau’s main goal was to protect France from yet another attack by Germany. He sought heavy reparations from Germany as a way of limiting German economic recovery after the war and minimizing this possibility.
Lloyd George, on the other hand, saw the rebuilding of Germany as a priority in order to reestablish the nation as a strong trading partner for Great Britain.
For his part, Orlando wanted to expand Italy’s influence and shape it into a major power that could hold its own alongside the other great nations.
Wilson opposed Italian territorial demands, as well as previously existing arrangements regarding territory between the other Allies; instead, he wanted to create a new world order along the lines of his Fourteen Points. The other leaders saw Wilson as too naive and idealistic, and his principles were difficult to translate into policy.
In the end, the European Allies imposed harsh peace terms on Germany, forcing the nation to surrender around 10 percent of its territory and all of its overseas possessions. Other key provisions of the Treaty of Versailles called for the demilitarization and occupation of the Rhineland, it limited Germany’s army and navy, it forbade Germany to maintain an air force, and it required war crimes trials against Kaiser Wilhelm II and other leaders for their aggression.
Most importantly, Article 231 of the treaty, better known as the “war guilt clause,” forced Germany to accept full responsibility for starting World War I and pay enormous reparations for Allied war losses.
The Treaty of Versailles was signed on June 28th, 1919, exactly five years after the Serbian nationalist Gavrilo Princip assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife in Sarajevo.
The treaty included a covenant creating the League of Nations, an international organization aimed at preserving peace, but the United States would never join the short-lived League of Nations.
Germans were furious about the treaty. The nation’s burden of reparations topped $33 billion, a sum so great that no one expected Germany to be able to pay in full; in fact, economists like John Maynard Keynes predicted the European economy would collapse if it did.
Some historians think the Treaty of Versailles was, in the words of British economist John Maynard Keynes, “one of the most serious acts of political unwisdom for which our statesmen have ever been responsible.” They say it contributed to German economic and political instability that allowed for the formation of the National Socialists (Nazis) just a year later.
Other historians note that the Treaty of Versailles was much more lenient than the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk which Germany forced on Russia when Russia negotiated an exit from the war a year earlier.
If World War I was to be the “war to end all wars,” the Treaty of Versailles would ensure that peace could not last. The humiliation and the lasting bitterness it engendered would pave the way to another World War just two decades later.
University of Rochester associate professor of political science Hein Goemans says, “But . . .you have to ask . . ., ‘Why does this form of dispute resolution work? Why does killing . . . millions of people make an agreement possible where there was no agreement possible before?’”
The answer is simple: Leaders of nations will make their people fight and die for years to acquire lands, resources, spoils, and prestige, but the moment they realize they’ve lost and they must either quit fighting or die themselves, they wave the white flag and make a peace treaty.
U.S.: 323,018 with 116,516 dead
British Empire: 3,190,235 with 908,371 dead
France: 6,160,800 with 1,357,800 dead
Italy: 2,197,000 with 650,000 dead
Russia: 9,150,000 with 1,700,000 dead
Romania: 535,706 with 335,706 dead
Serbia: 331,106 with 45,000 dead
Allies (including Japan, Belgium, Greece, Portugal, and Montenegro): 22,064,427 with 5,142,631 dead
Germany: 7,142,558 with 1,773,700 dead
Austria-Hungary: 7,020,000 with 1,200,000 dead
Ottoman Empire: 975,000 with 325,000 dead
Bulgaria: 266,919 with 87,500 dead
Central Powers: 15,404,477 with 3,386,200 dead
Total Casualties in World War I: 37,468,904 with 8,528,831 dead
To add to the horrors of World War I, the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918-1919 was the deadliest pandemic in world history, infecting some 500 million people across the globe—roughly one-third of the population—and causing up to 50 million deaths, including some 675,000 deaths in the United States alone. The disease, caused by a new variant of the influenza virus, was spread in part by troop movements during World War I. Though the flu pandemic hit much of Europe during the war, news reports from Spain weren’t subject to wartime censorship, so the misnomer “Spanish flu” entered common usage. With no vaccines or effective treatments, the pandemic caused massive social disruption: Schools, theaters, churches and businesses were forced to close, citizens were ordered to wear masks and bodies piled up in makeshift morgues before the virus ended its deadly worldwide march in early 1920.
There are many famous books and paintings inspired by World War I, too many to list them all here. But this is a short list of some of the most acclaimed works that depict an aspect of World War I.
Full Disclosure: If you buy any of these books with the link provided, I get a portion of that sale at no extra cost to you.
The masterpiece of the German experience during World War I, considered by many the greatest war novel of all time—with an Oscar–winning film adaptation now streaming on Netflix.
“[Erich Maria Remarque] is a craftsman of unquestionably first rank.”—The New York Times Book Review
I am young, I am twenty years old; yet I know nothing of life but despair, death, fear, and fatuous superficiality cast over an abyss of sorrow. . . .
This is the testament of Paul Bäumer, who enlists with his classmates in the German army during World War I. They become soldiers with youthful enthusiasm. But the world of duty, culture, and progress they had been taught breaks in pieces under the first bombardment in the trenches.
Through years of vivid horror, Paul holds fast to a single vow: to fight against the principle of hate that meaninglessly pits young men of the same generation but different uniforms against one another . . . if only he can come out of the war alive.
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Ernest Hemingway’s classic novel of love during wartime.
Written when Ernest Hemingway was thirty years old and lauded as the best American novel to emerge from World War I, A Farewell to Arms is the unforgettable story of an American ambulance driver on the Italian front and his passion for a beautiful English nurse. Set against the looming horrors of the battlefield, this gripping, semiautobiographical work captures the harsh realities of war and the pain of lovers caught in its inexorable sweep.
Hemingway famously rewrote the ending to A Farewell to Arms thirty-nine times to get the words right. A classic novel of love during wartime, “A Farewell to Arms stands, more than eighty years after its first appearance, as a towering ornament of American literature” (The Washington Times).
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The most vivid, moving – and devastating – word-portrait of a World War One British commander ever written.
C.S. Forester’s 1936 masterpiece follows Lt General Herbert Curzon, who fumbled a fortuitous early step on the path to glory in the Boer War. 1914 finds him an honourable, decent, brave and wholly unimaginative colonel. Survival through the early slaughters in which so many fellow-officers perished then brings him rapid promotion. By 1916, he is a general in command of 100,000 British soldiers, whom he leads through the horrors of the Somme and Passchendaele, a position for which he is entirely unsuited and intellectually unprepared.
Wonderfully human with Forester’s droll relish for human folly on full display, this is the story of a man of his time who is anything but wicked, yet presides over appalling sacrifice and tragedy. In his awkwardness and his marriage to a Duke’s unlovely, unhappy daughter, Curzon embodies Forester’s full powers as a storyteller. His half-hero is patriotic, diligent, even courageous, driven by his sense of duty and refusal to yield to difficulties. But also powerfully condemned is the same spirit which caused a hundred real-life British generals to serve as high priests at the bloodiest human sacrifice in the nation’s history. A masterful and insightful study about the perils of hubris and unquestioning duty in leadership, The General is a fable for our times.
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An immediate bestseller upon its original publication in 1939, Dalton Trumbo’s stark, profoundly troubling masterpiece about the horrors of World War I brilliantly crystallized the uncompromising brutality of war and became the most influential protest novel of the Vietnam era. Johnny Got His Gun is an undisputed classic of antiwar literature that’s as timely as ever.
“A terrifying book, of an extraordinary emotional intensity.”–The Washington Post
“Powerful. . . an eye-opener.” –Michael Moore
“Mr. Trumbo sets this story down almost without pause or punctuation and with a fury amounting to eloquence.”–The New York Times
“A book that can never be forgotten by anyone who reads it.”–Saturday Review
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Gassed is a very large oil painting completed in March 1919 by John Singer Sargent. It depicts the aftermath of a mustard gas attack during the First World War, with a line of wounded soldiers walking towards a dressing station. Sargent was commissioned by the British War Memorials Committee to document the war and visited the Western Front. The painting was finished in March 1919 and voted picture of the year by the Royal Academy of Arts in 1919. It is now held by the Imperial War Museum.
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Charge of Flowerdew’s Squadron by Alfred Munnings portrays the Allied cavalry attack against the Germans at Moreuil Wood. The Battle of Moreuil Wood (30 March 1918) was an engagement of World War I that took place on the banks of the river Avre in France, where the Canadian Cavalry Brigade attacked and forced the German 23rd Saxon Division to withdraw from Moreuil Wood, a commanding position on the river bank. While the Germans ultimately succeeded in recapturing the wood by the battle’s end, the delay caused by the Allies contributed to the halt of the Spring Offensive. During the battle, a Victoria Cross was awarded to Canadian Gordon Flowerdew of Lord Strathcona’s Horse.
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Over The Top is a 1918 oil-on-canvas painting by John Nash. It depicts a counter-attack on Welsh Ridge in northern France on 30 December 1917, during the First World War. It shows British soldiers in heavy winter greatcoats scrambling up from their trenches to advance over a snow-covered landscape. Two already lie dead or wounded on the duckboards in the base of the trench and one on the snow. The others move to the right without looking back. The painting is based on Nash’s experience while serving in the 28th Battalion, the London Regiment. His unit went “over the top,” to push towards Marcoing near Cambrai. Of the 80 men, 68 were killed or wounded by the shell-fire during the first few minutes. Nash was one of the 12 that survived. The painting is held by Imperial War Museum, London.
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1)Strategy Is Extremely Important
This cannot be overstated. The Generals and their strategical planning pretty much make all the difference. For much of the war, the Generals on both sides had terrible strategy.
For instance, British General Douglas Haig went so far as to argue “the machine gun is an overrated weapon—especially against the horse.”
Because of this, the British men used the tactic time and again of essentially locking arms and fighting German machine guns with their chests. Not surprisingly, many British men died. You have to ask the question: Why did no one think to stop running into machine gun fire?
As the old adage goes, repeating the same failed actions in the hopes of a different result is the very definition of insanity. Whether in the outbreaks of wars or their conduct, the role of stupidity and insanity in such affairs is considered by many to have no finer example than World War I.
On the other hand, when Generals had their armies make surprise attacks, especially in places where the opposition was weak, they fared much better.
2)Every Battle Will Be Long And Drawn Out
Time and time again, Generals predicted their strategy would give a quick and decisive victory. Yet time and time again, they were wrong. It got to the point where it almost seems comical that any General could expect their strategy would cause a quick and decisive victory, yet that is what they kept predicting, and national leaders on both sides of the war kept believing them. Maybe it was the hope for success, much the same way we can easily be deceived by a conman who promises us something that is too good to be true, but we just want something to go right so we foolishly believe the conman, and then he rips us off. In a World War, there is almost no such thing as a short and easy battle. And when there is, the opposition will counterattack that position and try to retake what they lost.
3)Things Are Crumbling And We Don’t Even Know It
It seems absurd that Czar Nicholas Romanov II could be so unaware of the impending doom of his kingdom. His country was on the verge of major collapse and he wasn’t paying one bit of attention. The same can happen to us. Maybe it’s our schools and communities. Maybe it’s our family, a spouse, or a child. Maybe it’s even our nation. There are so many people around us who are on the verge of collapse and we don’t even know it. There are so many people who could use a genuine hug or a genuine compliment. There are so many people who are suffering in silence and need our help. The question is: Will we open our eyes and pay attention or will we let everything around us collapse?
4)It’s Far Far Better To Prevent A War Than To Try To Win One
One of the most prominent ways that countries try to prevent a war is by having so great military strength that no other country would dare to go to war with you. If a country thinks they have no chance to defeat you, they won’t go to war. But if they think they can defeat you easily, they’ll go to war against you without giving it a second thought.
Look at the war in Ukraine. When the Russians lined up on the Ukrainian border for a month and all the intelligence was saying the Russians were about to invade Ukraine, I truly believed it wasn’t going to happen. My reasoning was sound. I said, “No one who’s going to invade would give an opponent a month’s notice. That would be the stupidest thing ever. That would be like Tom Brady telling the New York Giants’ Defense that on the next play Gronk is going to run a fade to the end zone and he’ll throw it to him. It just wouldn’t make any sense because it would give the Ukrainians a ton of time to prepare, organize their defenses, and dig trenches, etc.”
To my surprise, the Russians did the stupid thing and invaded after a month of basically telling the Ukrainians they were going to. How’d it go? Terrible for the Russians. They ran into a stiff Ukrainian defense who was prepared for them. Their trucks ran out of gas. Their soldiers didn’t have food or even jackets for the cold winter weather. There were no supply lines. The list of stupidity went on and on. It’s estimated that at the time of this writing, 150,000 Russian soldiers have been killed in Ukraine.
I mean, everyone knows that to have success in war, you have to surprise attack, right? I guess Putin never studied history. It just shows Putin’s unbelievable hubris. He literally thought they would just roll over Ukraine in three days, take the capital, kill Zelensky, and put in a new puppet to lead Ukraine who would be loyal to Russia. If Putin had surprise attacked in the middle of the night without giving Ukraine time to prepare itself, all of that just might have happened. But because of terrible military tactics, Russia is in a dogfight with Ukraine. They are very slowly gaining ground, but they are losing a ridiculous number of men. And the only reason any of this is happening is because Russia thought they were vastly more powerful than Ukraine and could easily crush them.
At the time of this writing, it’s estimated there have been 500,000 casualties in the war in Ukraine.
All those families torn apart, all those cities destroyed, all those people fighting on the front lines, living in very difficult conditions. It’s all just terrible. It would’ve been far far better to prevent the war in Ukraine and preserve the peace. Just like it is far far better to prevent another World War, especially between Nuclear Superpowers, and to preserve world peace and the global order.
Unfortunately, that is not always possible. Sometimes, one side is an aggressor and will not leave other countries alone. But world leaders need to exhaust every weapon in their diplomatic arsenal before going to war. Because war always leads to unimaginable death and destruction.
5)War Is Unpredictable
“Leaders on all sides did not choose the war . . . they ended up fighting,” said Daniel Sargent, a history professor at the University of California-Berkeley.
“It’s the repeated story, and you wonder why it takes people so much effort to learn it: that once you unleash large-scale violence, i.e. make war, it’s almost impossible to predict the course of events thereafter,” said David Kennedy, a Stanford history professor.
Once a war starts, it’s totally unpredictable, especially in this day and age. There are so many different types of weapons and so many different countries that it would be impossible to predict what would happen in a World War or to try to contain it. Another World War would no doubt cause the deaths of hundreds of millions of people, maybe even billions. And those who don’t die in the war will probably wish they had. There would be an unbelievable disruption to supply chains and civilization as we know it. Another World War would likely be a long, prolonged war and millions if not hundreds of millions of people would likely starve to death and live in absolutely terrible conditions. Another World War would probably be absolute hell for everyone living on the planet.
The whole reason we study history is to discover the patterns of the past and see how they’re unfolding today so we can forecast the future (and also because history is entertaining). Let’s take a look at the war in Ukraine and compare it to World War I and II.
With both Sweden and Finland recently joining, NATO is now up to 31 countries.
On the other side, Russia is being pushed into China’s arms. If World War III broke out, certainly North Korea, Cuba, Venezuela, and Iran would join them. So, just like pre-World War I, we have military alliances with major world powers.
Twenty days before invading Ukraine in 2022, Russia first made sure they had support from China. They jointly declared there were “no limits to Sino-Russian cooperation … no forbidden zones.”
This has come to be known as the “no limits” partnership between China and Russia.
It is exactly the same thing Austria-Hungary did prior to World War I in turning to Germany who offered “Carte Blanche” (or Blank Check) support.
The Germans were angry that part of their country, the Rhineland, was taken from them by the Treaty of Versailles. In 1936, three years before the beginning of World War II, the Germans retook the Rhineland, but they didn’t stop there. They annexed Austria and seized the Sudetenland in 1938, took over the rest of Czechoslovakia in March 1939, then Poland in September 1939.
The same exact thing is happening in Ukraine. The USSR willfully dissolved itself in 1991 and broke up into many countries, of which Russia is the biggest and most powerful militarily. Prior to its dissolution, Ukraine was a part of the USSR. Part of the reason Putin has ordered Russia to invade Ukraine is because he wants to restore Russia to its former glory under the USSR. Russia is trying to take back what they think belongs to them.
The same thing is happening with China. China feels Taiwan belongs to them and is expected to invade by 2027.
If you had asked anyone in the U.S. from 1914-16 or from 1939-most of 1941 if a World War was occurring, almost everyone would’ve said, “No, that’s a European conflict. It has nothing to do with us.” Yet, in both cases, they both became world wars. What’s the pattern here? A European conflict that draws in the U.S. Just how much is the U.S. involved in the war in Ukraine?
At the time of this writing, the U.S. has given Ukraine $175 billion and more is on the way.
Like it or not. The U.S. is heavily involved in a European conflict. And that $175 billion doesn’t even account for the influence the U.S. exerts on its allies in Europe to give money and weapons to Ukraine.
Has there been a spark to send the war in Ukraine into World War III? Not yet. This is the only item on the list of criteria that’s missing. But the problem with allowing a war to rage on is that things will inevitably escalate. They have to. Both sides have to escalate to win the war. We’re seeing it right now. For the first time, President Biden has given Ukraine permission to fire U.S. weapons into Russia with the caveat that they are only to be used on targets where Russia is preparing to strike Ukrainian cities.
In response to this, Putin said, “If they supply (weapons) to the combat zone and call for using these weapons against our territory, why don’t we have the right to do the same?”
The longer the war in Ukraine goes on, the more likely there will be a spark that turns it into World War III. But Russia isn’t the only potential catalyst for a spark to cause World War III.
China could easily spark World War III. China believes Taiwan is part of its country, but Taiwan believes it’s independent of China. This assertion makes China angry. For years, China has been harassing Taiwan by constantly sending warplanes and vessels around the island in what experts call “grey zone” actions—tactics that fall short of an outright war. Recently, Taipei’s defense ministry said in a report to parliament that Beijing had “intensified its military intimidation,” adding that drones and balloons sent around Taiwan and its outlying islands were a way to “collect intelligence.”
Will China invade Taiwan? Maybe. If they do, what will the U.S. do? In 2022, President Biden said U.S. forces would defend Taiwan in the event of a Chinese invasion.
That would mean a definite war between the U.S. and China which would no doubt turn into World War III. Both countries need to exert control over Taiwan. Over 60% of the world’s semiconductors and over 90% of the most advanced ones are made in Taiwan. Most are manufactured by a single company, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Corporation (TSMC).
Semiconductors are important because they are the foundation of modern computing. They are in smartphones and laptops, they are in communication infrastructure that form the backbone of the internet like routers and switches, they play a vital role in sustainability and are found in wind turbines and solar farms, they are in medical devices as well as implantable technology like pacemakers and insulin pumps, they are even found in your car and enable electronic control systems, remote keys, anti-lock braking systems, and rear-view cameras.
Critically, semiconductors play an essential role in military applications and enable advanced radar systems, communication devices, navigation systems, and weaponry.
With semiconductors being absolutely crucial to everyday life, technological advancement, and success on the battlefield, and with semiconductors being almost solely made in Taiwan, neither the U.S. nor China can afford to lose Taiwan. These realities along with China’s intensified military intimidation and harassment make Taiwan a very likely flash point to spark World War III.
In regards to China, there is another, less well-known, potential flash point to spark World War III. China claims “indisputable sovereignty” over almost all of the South China Sea and most of the islands and sandbars within it, including many features that are hundreds of miles away from mainland China. The Philippines, Malaysia, Vietnam, Brunei, and Taiwan hold competing claims.
Why is the South China Sea so important? There are two reasons.
1)An estimated third of global shipping worth trillions of dollars passes through the South China Sea each year. This makes it extremely important for both economic and military-strategic purposes.
2)According to the US Energy Information Agency, the South China Sea holds at least 190 trillion cubic feet of natural gas and 11 billion barrels of oil. Almost all of that energy is untapped.
China is busy drilling in waters close to its own shores, but the ample resources that the Philippines, Vietnam, and Malaysia are seeking to tap over Chinese objections is of little use to China: The gas deposits are just too far away from China to be pumped or piped back to the mainland. But those energy riches are ripe for the picking for nearby neighbors, who want to tap the gas (and oil) to limit their dependence on imported energy.
“The energy resources matter, but only for countries in Southeast Asia,” said Gregory Poling, director of the Asia Maritime Transparency Initiative and a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “China just doesn’t want them to have it.”
For the past decade, China has been chasing away fishing vessels, attacking other ships with water cannons, and smothering other countries’ vessels with a swarm of Chinese coast guards and navy vessels.
But recently, China has intensified its efforts to harass and chase away Philippine vessels operating in their own exclusive economic zone. More than 100 Chinese coast guard ships and so-called maritime militia vessels have continuously interfered with resupply missions to a Philippine outpost at Second Thomas Shoal, a tiny feature about 105 nautical miles off the country’s western coast.
Recently at Second Thomas Shoal, several Filipino seamen were injured when a Chinese vessel sideswiped a smaller Philippine vessel and another two Chinese coast guard ships used high-pressure water spray to shatter the Philippine vessel’s windscreen.
Asked if the submerged reef in the Spratly Islands was the most dangerous flash point in his area of command, U.S. Admiral John Aquilino answered, “I’m very concerned about what’s happening at the Second Thomas Shoal. I’m very, very concerned about the direction it’s going . . . These actions are dangerous, illegal and they are destabilizing the region.”
In 1951, the U.S. signed a Mutual Defense Treaty with the Philippines that extends to this day. Any armed attack on the Philippines, including public vessels, aircraft, or its Coast Guard, anywhere in the South China Sea would allow the Philippines to call on the U.S. for military intervention.
Gregory Poling said of Chinese aggression at Second Thomas Shoal and the South China Sea, “I believe the South China Sea is a far more likely trigger than Taiwan. The ceiling of any such conflict is lower” than any fight over Taiwan . . . On the other hand, it wouldn’t necessarily be a long time building. “This is something we could wake up to.”
So, right now, there are three very real possible flash points that could spark World War III: Ukraine, Taiwan, and the South China Sea.
That doesn’t mean World War III will necessarily happen right now either. It’s quite possible that Russia and Ukraine could both decide within a week that they don’t want to fight anymore, sign a peace treaty and stop fighting. But that doesn’t seem very plausible given history and human nature. As of right now, Russia won’t quit fighting until Ukraine surrenders. Ukraine won’t quit fighting until Russia leaves their country, including Crimea, and the other regions they’ve taken. Neither one of those scenarios seem likely, so it seems the war must go on.
Maybe China will de-escalate in both Taiwan and the South China Sea. Maybe they’ll leave other countries alone and let them live peacefully. However, that doesn’t seem likely given the rhetoric of Chinese leaders. It seems they want Taiwan to be united to their country and it seems they’re willing to risk escalating tensions in the South China Sea.
With the war in Ukraine happening, there’s a decent chance World War III has already begun and none of us are even aware of it.
The war in Ukraine and Chinese aggressions are the same exact patterns that happened prior to World War I and II.
Military alliances with major world powers: check.
A carte blanche or no limits partnership given to an invading world power: check.
Major countries seeking to expand their country through military dominance: check.
European conflict that draws in the US: check.
All that remains for World War III to break out and destroy civilization is a spark.
Let’s all hope and pray that spark never comes.
Adrian Harris is a writer, author, and business owner. He hopes to soon open his own movie studio and become a movie producer, director, and actor. Read Adrian’s Bio.
Adrian Harris is a writer, author, and business owner. He hopes to soon open his own movie studio and become a movie producer, director, and actor. Read Adrian’s Bio.
*Comedy Short Story
Adrian parked the car in the driveway as he and his beautiful wife, Hannah, arrived at home. As they got out of the car, Hannah looked at the blooming flowers in their garden then at their two-story house, “It’s good to be home.”
About six years ago, I received the worst possible revelation from the Holy Ghost you can possibly receive. The Holy Ghost told me to study the Book of Job. The moment he told me that, I immediately put my head down. I knew what God was saying.
Denis (I believe it’s pronounced Deni. The s is silent. Denis is French and French words and names are never pronounced how they’re spelled. The same can be said for a lot of English words) Villeneuve’s Dune Part 2 was probably the most anticipated release of the year.
