History · The 20th century

The First World War

28 July 1914 – 11 November 1918

Global conflict — the Allies against the Central Powers

The conflict that began when Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia on 28 July 1914, a month after the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo, and which the alliance system turned within a week into a general European war. Germany's invasion of Belgium brought in Britain; the western advance was halted at the Marne and froze into a line of trenches from the North Sea to Switzerland that barely moved for three years. Fighting spread to the Eastern Front, Italy, Gallipoli, the Middle East and Africa, and to the sea and the air. Russia left after its 1917 revolutions; the United States entered in April 1917. Germany signed an armistice in a railway carriage at Compiègne, effective at 11 a.m. on 11 November 1918. Around nine to ten million combatants and a similar number of civilians died, four empires fell, and the peace settlement shaped the rest of the century.

How to spot them

▸A shot fired in Sarajevo on 28 June 1914 that set the alliance system in motion
▸A trench line running from the North Sea to the Swiss border
▸Poison gas, tanks, U-boats and aerial dogfights in their first mass use
▸An armistice signed in a railway carriage in the Forest of Compiègne
▸Four empires destroyed: German, Austro-Hungarian, Russian and Ottoman

What happened

The assassination of an archduke and his wife by Gavrilo Princip (1914)

Franz Ferdinand and Sophie were shot in Sarajevo on 28 June after a bungled bomb attempt earlier that morning

'The lamps are going out all over Europe; we shall not see them lit again in our lifetime' (1914)

Attributed to the British Foreign Secretary, Sir Edward Grey, on the eve of Britain's entry

An unofficial truce in no man's land at Christmas, with carols and football (1914)

Widespread along the British and German lines in December 1914 and never repeated on that scale

A landing on the Gallipoli peninsula that cost Churchill his post at the Admiralty (1915)

The Dardanelles campaign; ANZAC Day still marks the 25 April landings

57,470 British casualties on a single July morning on the Somme (1916)

1 July 1916, the bloodiest day in the history of the British Army

The ten-month grinding battle summed up as 'Ils ne passeront pas' (1916)

Verdun, where Pétain's defence made his reputation and the Germans aimed to 'bleed France white'

Mud, duckboards and the capture of a Belgian village after three months (1917)

The Third Battle of Ypres, remembered by the name of the village of Passchendaele

Quick-fire facts

•Began with Austria-Hungary's declaration of war on Serbia on 28 July 1914; the armistice took effect at 11 a.m. on 11 November 1918
•The Allies (Entente) included France, Russia, Britain, Italy from 1915 and the United States from April 1917; the Central Powers were Germany, Austria-Hungary, the Ottoman Empire and Bulgaria
•Germany's opening move followed a version of the Schlieffen Plan, invading neutral Belgium to outflank the French
•Chlorine gas was first used on a large scale at the Second Battle of Ypres in April 1915
•Tanks appeared at Flers-Courcelette on the Somme in September 1916; Cambrai in 1917 was the first mass tank attack
•Jutland in May 1916 was the only full fleet action between the British Grand Fleet and the German High Seas Fleet
•The sinking of the Lusitania in 1915 and the Zimmermann Telegram of 1917 helped turn American opinion
•Wilfred Owen was killed a week before the armistice; Rupert Brooke, Isaac Rosenberg and Edward Thomas also died in the war
•John McCrae's 'In Flanders Fields' gave the remembrance poppy its association
•The peace with Germany was the Treaty of Versailles of 28 June 1919; separate treaties settled with Austria (Saint-Germain), Bulgaria (Neuilly), Hungary (Trianon) and the Ottomans (Sèvres, later replaced by Lausanne)

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Sources

Imperial War Museums — First World War
Hew Strachan — The First World War
Christopher Clark — The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914