The First World War 1914–1918: causes, course and how it is remembered today

How the war began

The First World War began on 28 July 1914, when Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia. Within a week six great powers were at war with one another: Germany declared war on Russia on 1 August and on France on 3 August, German troops entered neutral Belgium on 4 August, and Britain declared war the same day.

The immediate trigger was the assassination of the Austro-Hungarian heir Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo on 28 June 1914. The causes lie further back: an alliance system that turned any local quarrel into a continental one, an arms race with no brake, imperial rivalry, and mobilisation timetables that, once started, left governments no way to stop without appearing to surrender.

Four years of attrition

Every general staff had planned for a short campaign. After ten weeks the war of movement was over. Following the Battle of the Marne in September 1914 both sides dug in, and the Western Front settled into a continuous line of some 700 kilometres from the North Sea to the Swiss border. It barely moved until 1918.

What followed was a war of material. Verdun and the Somme in 1916 each cost roughly a million casualties on both sides combined; the front line at the end of each lay approximately where it had been at the start. The Eastern Front remained more mobile, spanning some 1,500 kilometres, and Russia left the war in March 1918 after two revolutions. In the west the arrival of American troops from 1918 decided the balance.

Fighting on the Western Front ended at 11 o'clock on 11 November 1918 with the armistice signed in a railway carriage in the forest of Compiègne.

The cost

Around 70 million people were mobilised. Roughly 9 to 10 million soldiers were killed and about 20 million wounded, many permanently disabled. Civilian deaths from occupation, displacement, hunger and the influenza pandemic of 1918 add a comparable figure. These are orders of magnitude, not exact counts: definitions differ, and for several theatres of war no reliable registers exist at all.

The war also ended four empires – the German, the Austro-Hungarian, the Russian and the Ottoman. Out of their collapse came Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Czechoslovakia and the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, along with the republics of Austria and Hungary in new borders.

Where the dead lie

The First World War was the first conflict in which an ordinary soldier was granted the right to an individual, permanently maintained grave bearing his name. Before that, the rank and file were buried in mass graves and only officers received a monument. That change is the reason the war cemeteries of Europe exist at all.

This portal maintains a register of 5,193 war grave sites in 58 countries, from a handful of graves in a village churchyard to collective cemeteries holding tens of thousands. The register is in German, but it is searchable by place name and by country and works the same way in any language.

It lists sites, not people. Name lists of those buried are held by the responsible war graves services. The route from a person to a grave is set out, in German, in the guide to searching for war graves.

How it is remembered

Remembrance of this war differs sharply from country to country, and the differences follow the outcome. In France 11 November is a national holiday and nearly every commune has its monument aux morts. In Britain and the Commonwealth the Remembrance Day poppy and the two-minute silence form a highly ritualised observance. In Belgium the Last Post has been sounded at the Menin Gate in Ypres every evening since 1928.

Germany has no victory day and no national holiday arising from this war. Instead there is the Volkstrauertag, a day of mourning for the victims of war and tyranny, held two Sundays before Advent. The Second World War also overlays the memory of the First in a way it does not elsewhere.

Since the death of the last veterans around 2010 there are no living witnesses. Remembrance now rests entirely on what was written down, photographed, built and buried – and on the decision to go and look at it.

What is in this portal

The English section covers the core subjects: this overview, remembrance, exhibitions, events, education and a directory of online resources. The full register of war grave sites, the searchable cemetery list and the detailed subject pages are in the German section, which is considerably larger.

That imbalance is inherited rather than intended: the material this portal is built on was always more extensive in German. Where an English page would only repeat what the German one says at greater length, the link points there instead.