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The First World War was fought between 1914 and 1918 by two rival alliances. The Allied Powers, led by Britain, France and Russia, faced the Central Powers, led by Germany, Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman Empire. It began after Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, was assassinated in Sarajevo in June 1914. A web of treaties then pulled one country after another into the fighting.
On the Western Front, armies dug trenches from the North Sea to Switzerland and the war became a grinding stalemate. Battles such as Verdun and the Somme caused casualties in the hundreds of thousands. By the armistice on 11 November 1918, around nine million soldiers had been killed, and four great empires had fallen or were about to.
Did the war change the world for good? Use the tabs above or scroll down. Each section ends with a verdict on how permanent the change was.
Archduke Franz Ferdinand is assassinated in Sarajevo.
Germany invades Belgium and Britain declares war.
Trenches stretch across the Western Front and the fighting stalls.
Verdun and the Somme. Britain introduces conscription.
The USA enters the war on the Allied side.
Revolution in Russia. Russia leaves the war in March 1918.
An armistice ends the fighting on the Western Front.
The Treaty of Versailles is signed with Germany.
Before 1914, most of Eastern and Central Europe was ruled by four huge empires: German, Austro-Hungarian, Russian and Ottoman. By 1920 all four had been broken up or were falling apart. The peace treaties redrew the map. Poland, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia appeared, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania became independent, and Germany lost land to France, Belgium, Denmark and Poland.
Move your mouse over the map. Inside the circle you see Europe in 1920; outside it is 1914. On a phone, tap the map or use the slider.
In 1918 the empire fell apart. Austria and Hungary became separate countries, Czechoslovakia was created, and other lands went to Poland, Romania and the new Yugoslavia.
Poland had been divided between Russia, Prussia and Austria since the 1790s. In 1918 it became independent again, built from land taken from all three former empires.
Under the Treaty of Versailles (1919) Germany gave Alsace-Lorraine back to France and lost land to Poland, including a strip of territory that gave Poland access to the sea. Small areas went to Belgium and Denmark, and Germany lost all of its overseas colonies.
Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania broke away from the old Russian Empire and became independent countries in 1918.
Serbia joined with Montenegro and former Austro-Hungarian lands to form the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes in 1918. It was renamed Yugoslavia in 1929.
The Ottoman Empire lost its Arab lands, which Britain and France ran as League of Nations mandates. By 1923 the sultanate was gone and the Republic of Turkey had been founded.
Russia lost Finland, Poland and the Baltic states. After the revolutions of 1917 and a civil war it became Soviet Russia, and from 1922 part of the USSR. It had already left the war in March 1918.
Mixed.Many of the 1919 borders survived, and Poland and the Baltic states are still countries today. But Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia both broke up again in the 1990s, the USSR collapsed in 1991, and many historians argue the peace settlement left grievances that fed into the Second World War.
With millions of men at the front, women were needed to keep the country running. That changed what many people believed women could do.
British women could not vote in national elections. Most worked in domestic service, textiles or shops, and married women were expected to stay at home.
The suffragists and suffragettes were campaigning hard for the vote, but had not yet won it.
The main suffragette group paused its campaign to support the war effort. Women made shells in munitions factories, drove trams and buses, worked on farms and served as nurses close to the front line.
By 1918 roughly 1.5 million more women were in paid work than in 1914.
In 1918 women over 30 who met a property qualification won the vote. In 1928 the voting age for women was lowered to 21, the same as for men. The Sex Disqualification (Removal) Act of 1919 opened professions such as law to women.
But when soldiers came home, many women were pushed out of their wartime jobs, and many employers made women leave when they married.
Mixed.The vote was a permanent gain and the idea of women doing skilled work did not disappear. But most women lost their wartime jobs after 1918, and real equality in pay and opportunity took many more decades.
Between 1914 and 1918 the public mood swung from excitement to grief and anger, and it never fully swung back.
Many people believed the war would be short, glorious and over by Christmas. Patriotism was strong, young men rushed to enlist, and most people trusted their government, their officers and their newspapers.
Posters and newspapers urged people to support the war and hate the enemy. As casualty lists grew, trust faded. Letters and poems from the trenches described mud, rats and constant shellfire.
Some men refused to fight on principle. About 16,000 men in Britain were registered as conscientious objectors.
Britain fell silent each year on Armistice Day. The Cenotaph was unveiled in 1920 and the poppy became a symbol of remembrance in 1921. Many people said "never again" and doubted that war could solve problems.
Poets such as Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon shaped how later generations saw the war.
Mostly lasting.Remembrance Day is still observed every year, and the war left a lasting suspicion of "glory" and of leaders who send people to fight. But the "never again" mood did not prevent a second world war only twenty years later.
Britain went to war with a small professional army. Within two years it had become a mass army of millions.
The British Army had only about a quarter of a million regular soldiers, far fewer than Germany or France. Joining was voluntary, and there was no conscription in peacetime.
Lord Kitchener's appeal for volunteers brought in around a million men within the first few months. "Pals" battalions let friends, neighbours and workmates serve together. By the end of 1915 about 2.4 million men had volunteered.
Losses were so heavy that volunteers were not enough. Conscription began in 1916. Soldiers also came from across the Empire, including over a million from India.
Conscription ended in 1920 and Britain returned to a smaller volunteer army. But the idea that the government could force men to fight had been accepted. Conscription returned in 1939, and national service lasted until 1960.
Mostly temporary.Conscription ended in 1920 and the army shrank again. The lasting effect was the precedent: once the state had forced men to serve, it was easier to do so again in 1939.
Industrial technology made defending far easier than attacking. Both sides dug in, and spent four years searching for a way out of the trenches.
Armies still trained for fast, open warfare with rifles, bayonets and cavalry. Generals expected a short war decided by a quick attack.
Machine guns and heavy artillery made charging across open ground deadly. New weapons appeared almost every year: poison gas in 1915, tanks in 1916, and aircraft that grew from scouts into fighters and bombers.
Gas was banned by the Geneva Protocol in 1925, but tanks, aircraft and submarines did not go away. Countries spent the next twenty years building bigger versions of them, and they became central to the Second World War.
| Weapon | When it mattered | What it changed |
|---|---|---|
| Machine gun | From 1914 | A single gun could fire around 500 rounds a minute, so a few men could stop a charge by hundreds. |
| Artillery | Throughout | The biggest killer of the war. By some estimates it caused around six in ten battlefield deaths. |
| Poison gas | April 1915, at Ypres | Chlorine, then phosgene and mustard gas. Gas caused over a million casualties and forced every army to issue gas masks. |
| Tanks | 15 September 1916, on the Somme | Designed to cross trenches and crush barbed wire. Slow and unreliable at first, but they showed the future of armoured warfare. |
| Aircraft | From 1914 | Scouts that spotted for the artillery turned into fighters and bombers. The Royal Air Force was formed on 1 April 1918. |
| U-boats | From 1915 | German submarines tried to starve Britain by sinking merchant ships. The Allies answered with convoys in 1917. |
Permanent.Armoured vehicles, air power and the mass production of weapons are still at the centre of warfare today. These were not temporary wartime experiments.
War is expensive. Britain went from being the world's banker to being deeply in debt, and the government took a much bigger role in everyday life.
Britain was the world's leading trading nation and financial centre. The pound was backed by gold, taxes were low, and the government played a small part in the economy.
The government borrowed enormous sums, raised income tax and took control of railways, shipping and coal mines. The Defence of the Realm Act (1914) gave the state new powers over daily life.
German U-boats and food shortages led to rationing of sugar, meat and butter in 1918.
Britain owed huge sums to the USA, which replaced it as the world's leading economic power. Coal, cotton and shipbuilding lost overseas markets, and unemployment passed two million in 1921.
Germany was ordered to pay reparations, and in 1923 it suffered hyperinflation.
Mostly lasting.The shift of economic power to the USA never reversed, and the government kept a bigger role in the economy. Some wartime rules even stayed: British Summer Time began in 1916 and is still with us. Rationing and direct control of industry, however, were wound down.
Wounds on a scale nobody had seen before forced doctors and surgeons to invent new ways of saving lives.
There were no antibiotics, and infection killed many of the wounded. Blood transfusion was rare and risky, X-rays were still fairly new, and plastic surgery barely existed.
Doctors organised a chain of care from the front line to the hospital. The Thomas splint cut deaths from broken thigh bones, mobile X-ray units found shrapnel, and surgeons began rebuilding badly injured faces.
The war also forced doctors to take mental trauma, then called shell shock, seriously.
Blood banks, plastic surgery, better artificial limbs, X-rays and rehabilitation all carried on into peacetime. Alexander Fleming served in the army medical corps, saw soldiers die from infected wounds, and discovered penicillin in 1928.
Permanent.Triage, blood transfusion, plastic surgery and rehabilitation are all part of modern medicine. This is one of the clearest lasting benefits to come out of the war.
Each bar shows how long the change lasted, from temporary on the left to permanent on the right. Select a topic to jump back to it.
Many borders lasted, but several new states broke up again later.
The vote stayed, but most wartime jobs were lost.
Remembrance and distrust of "glory" lasted.
Conscription ended in 1920, though it set a precedent.
Tanks, aircraft and mass production shaped all later wars.
Economic power moved to the USA and government grew.
Blood banks, plastic surgery and triage are still used.
Some changes lasted. Women gained the vote, medicine advanced, warfare became mechanised, economic power moved to the USA, and remembrance became part of national life. Others faded quickly: conscription was dropped in 1920, most women lost their wartime jobs, and the "never again" mood did not stop another war in 1939.
So the answer is mixed. The First World War was a turning point, but how permanent each change turned out to be depended on what governments and ordinary people chose to do with it afterwards.