Though soldiers from many dominions fought in the war, WWI (or the Great War as it is often called in Britain) was essentially a European conflict, with side-shows in various parts of the world because of the imperial interests involved. The main belligerents were Germany, Austria and the Ottomans (the Central Powers) on the one side, and Russia, France and Britain (the Entente or Allied Powers) on the other. Though the causes of the war are many and complex, most scholars are agreed that the central issues had to do with the German ambition for "their place in the sun" and the Russian ambition and interest in the Balkans (a chance to get a warm-water port; all her ports are locked out in winter); both nations had come late into the game of colonization, and did not want to miss the boat. The war produced some of the most brutal and barbaric atrocities in human history. The war ended with the Treaty of Paris, 1920, but because of the hugely unfair and burdensome conditions it laid down on Germany, it sowed the seeds, instead, for WWII.
Standard textbooks almost always aver that it was the assassination of Archduke Franz Joseph (heir to the Habsburg throne of Austria-Hungary) and his wife by a Serbian revolutionary in Sarajevo (then part of Austrian territory) on August 1915, as the cause of the war. The assassination did serve as a useful excuse, but it was never evident to any intelligent person then living, or to any historian afterwards, that war was inevitable because of the assassination. According to one-time British PM David Lloyd George, reflecting on it later, Europe had simply "slithered over the brink into the boiling cauldron of war without any trace of apprehension or dismay." That may have reflected a very British view. Germany, on the other hand, already had a very clearly worked out plan of war (known as the Schlieffen Plan, which required first putting France on the west out of action before turning on Russia in the east) and she encouraged Austrian belligerence with what has come to be called "the blank cheque," a promise to come to her aid should she be attacked in her effort to find satisfaction for the murder of her royal heir. When Austria, after a few weeks of delay, finally presented Serbia with an ultimatum to which (everyone knew) the latter could not have accepted, war was declared. The Russians piled in to help the Balkan state. Germany swept through neutral Belgium to attack France. England, feeling that she then had to fight Germany for violating the neutrality of Belgium, came in on the side of France.
The war quickly descended into the carnage and barbarity on the trench warfare for which the war has become infamous. Soldiers were fed into the battles like wood into a locomotive furnace just to gain a few yards of territory, only to be lost again the next day. It soon became clear to everyone that the war was not going to be over by Christmas. It dragged on for four long years taking, on the average, 5,600 soldiers every day of the war (Britain lost 20,000 soldiers in the first day of the Battle of Somme, 1 July 1916, alone), and destroying the lives and properties of countless more civilian victims.
The geopolitical consequences of the war were tectonic. Three great empires that had shaped world affairs for centuries—the Romanov of Russia, the Habsburg of Austria and the Ottomans—were extirpated. The success of the Communists in Russia owed much to the deliberate decision of the Germans to pack, midway through the war, Vladimir Lenin (then in political exile in neutral Switzerland) in a special train and sent him back to St Petersburg to bring down the Tzar. The national boundaries we are familiar with today—of nations like Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, Palestine, Syria, of the Balkans—were the results of the war's end. With regards to the Protestant Church, the war swept away the comfortable conviction of liberal Protestantism in the natural progress of humans to attain to the highest good of which Christianity was the clearest manifestation.
Then came the cataclysm of the First World War; and the young pastor [Karl Barth], sitting in his study in peaceful Switzerland, found that he had nothing to say to his people. The moral and spiritual consequences of the First World War were far more devastating than those of the second, since it burst upon a Church and a world which were utterly unprepared for anything of the kind. It had been taken for granted, especially in Christian circles, that, . . war as an instrument of policy among the great nations of the world was unthinkable. . . . Then the explosion came. What had the Church to say? The evolutionary doctrine, to which most of the churches had committed themselves, was suddenly and horrifyingly contradicted by the regression of great nations into barbarism. Moral platitudes and optimistic vistas now had nothing to say to people. Christian and non-Christian alike were plunged into perplexities, to which there seemed to be no answer, from which there seemed to be no way out. In this time of mental and spiritual disarray Karl Barth turned back to the Bible; he seemed to be reading it for the first time, as he discovered that the Bible is not a collection of the pious meditation of man upon God, but the clarion tones in which God speaks to man and demands his response." (Stephan Neill and Tom Wright, The Interpretation of the New Testament, 1861-1986, 220-1.)
Karl Barth's subsequent theological reconstruction was not enough to break the back of Christian liberalism, but it broke enough that needed breaking for true evangelical renewal.
Further Reading:
Christopher Clark, The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914. London: Penguin, 2011.
Martin Gilbert, The First World War. A Complete History. London: Phoenix, 1994. Useful for a sweep of the main course of the war.
John Keegan, The First World War. New York: Vintage Books, 2000.
Richard J. Evans, The Pursuit of Power. Europe 1815-1914 The Penguin History of Europe; London: Allen Lane, 2016.
Ian Kershaw, To Hell and Back. Europe 1914-1949. The Penguin History of Europe; London: Allen Lane, 2015. See esp. the section, 'Christian Churches: Challenge and Continuity,' pp.430-447 on the impact of the war on the Church.
Margaret MacMillan, Peacemakers: Six Months that Changed the World. London: Random House, 2003.(Also published as Paris 1919. Six Months that Changed the World)
Margaret MacMillan, The War that Ended Peace: How Europe Abandoned Peace for the First World War. London: Random House, 2013.
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