The Most Concise History of World War One Ever Written?

E.H. Gombrich

When, in the spring of 1914, the heir to the Austrian throne was visiting one of these newly conquered regions called Bosnia, he was murdered by a Serb in the capital, Sarajevo.

Austria’s generals and politicians thought at the time that a war with Serbia was inevitable. The dreadful murder had to be avenged, and Serbia humbled. Frightened by Austria’s advance, Russia was drawn in, whereupon Germany, as Austria’s ally, also became involved. And once Germany was in the war, all the ancient enmities were unleashed. The Germans wanted to begin by destroying France, their most dangerous enemy, so they marched straight across neutral Belgium to attack Paris. Britain, fearing that a German victory would make Germany all-powerful, now joined in as well. Soon the whole world was at war with Germany and Austria, and the two countries found themselves surrounded by the armies of the entente (meaning their allied enemies—those who had an understanding with one another). Germany and Austria, in the middle, were known as the ‘central powers’.

The gigantic Russian armies pressed forward, but were brought to a standstill after a few months. The world has never seen a war like it. Millions and millions of people marched against each other. Even Africans and Indians had to fight. The German armies were stopped when they reached the River Marne, not far from Paris. From this moment on, real battles, in the old sense, would only very rarely be fought. Instead, giant armies dug themselves in, and made their camps in endlessly long trenches facing one another.

Then, for days on end, they fired thousands of guns at each other, bursting out in assaults through barricades of barbed wire and blown-up trenches, across a scorched and devastated wasteland strewn with corpses. In 1915, Italy also declared war on Austria, despite having originally been its ally. Now people fought in the snow and ice of the mountains of the Tirol and the famous exploits of Hannibal’s warriors during their crossing of the Alps seemed like child’s play compared with the courage and endurance shown by these simple soldiers.

People fought each other in the skies in aeroplanes; they dropped bombs on peaceful towns, sank innocent ships, and fought on the sea and under the sea, just as Leonardo da Vinci had foreseen. People invented horrible weapons that murdered and mutilated thousands each day, the most terrible of which were gases that poisoned the air. Anyone who breathed them died in terrible agony. These gases were either released and carried to the enemy soldiers on the wind, or fired in the form of grenades which released their poison when they exploded. People built armoured cars and tanks which moved slowly and inexorably over ditches and walls, demolishing and crushing everything in their path.

The people of Germany and Austria were destitute. For a long time there was hardly anything to eat, no clothes, no coal and no light. Women had to queue for hours in the cold to buy the smallest piece of bread or a half-rotten potato. But just once there was aglimmer of hope. In Russia a revolution had broken out in 1917.

The tsar had abdicated, but the bourgeois government which followed wanted to continue with the war. However, the people were against it. So there was a second great uprising in which the factory workers, under the guidance of their leader, Lenin, seized power. They shared out the farmland among the peasants, confiscated the property of the rich and the nobility, and tried to rule the empire according to the principles of Karl Marx. Then the outside world intervened, and in the fearful battles that followed millions more people died. Lenin’s successors continued to rule Russia for many years.

The Germans were able to recall some of their troops from the eastern front, but this didn’t help them much because new, fresh soldiers now attacked them from the west. The Americans had decided to step in. Nevertheless, the Germans and Austrians held out for more than a year against overwhelming odds. By putting all their efforts into a last desperate attempt in the west, they very nearly won. In the end, however, they were exhausted. And when, in 1918, America’s President Wilson announced that he wanted a just peace in which each nation would determine its own fate, many of their troops gave up. So Germany and Austria were forced to agree to a ceasefire. Those who had survived returned home to their starving families.

The next thing that happened was that revolution broke out in these exhausted countries. The emperors of Germany and Austria abdicated and the various peoples of the Austrian empire – the Czechs and the Slovaks, the Hungarians, the Poles and the Southern Slavs – declared themselves independent and founded individual states. Then, having understood from President Wilson that there was to be a peace treaty, and that negotiations were to be held in the ancient royal palaces of Versailles, St Germain, and the Trianon, Austria, Hungary, and Germany sent envoys to Paris, only to discover that they were excluded from these negotiations. Germany was held chiefly responsible for the war and was to be punished. Not only did the Germans have to surrender all the colonies and lands which they had taken from France in 1870, and pay vast sums of money to the victors each year, but they even had to sign a formal declaration saying that Germany alone was to blame for the war. The Austrians and the Hungarians fared little better. So this was how President Wilson kept his promises. (What you have just read is what I believed to be true when I wrote this account, but read my explanation in the final chapter of this book.)

Eleven million people died in that war and entire regions were devastated in a way that had never been seen before. The suffering was beyond imagination.

Source:  A Little of History of the World, Yale University Press, 1985