Major Powers Mobilized, WW1. Within two months of the incident at Sarajevo, 17 million soldiers were mobilized from eight nations and their far-flung colonies. At the outset, strategist for both the Allies (the countries grouped around France, Britain and Russia) and the Central Powers (those siding with Germany and Austria-Hugary) predicted a brief war (1914 to 1919).

During the war hundreds of thousands of men were lost in a matter of weeks because of the efficiency of modern weaponry. Generals realized that fighting on open ground was suicidal, so each army built lines of trenches, which soon zigzagged hundreds of miles from the English channel to Switzerland. There, the front would remain for four years, barely moving, as incessant shelling obliterated everything around it, turning the land into a desolate moonscape.

The prelude to war, Circa 1914: “Archduke Franz Ferdinad knew his first official visit to Sarajevo would be dangerous. The capital of Bosnia and Hercegovina twin provinces once part of Serbia, later conquered by Turkey then occupied and finally annexed by Austria-Hungary– had become a hotbed of pan-Serbian nationalism.

The assasination of the Duke and his wife were the catalyst for the war, not it’s cause. WW1 brought new diabolism to the age-old art of mass killing, as chemical warfare took a prominent place along side old-fashioned, mechanical weaponry. Gas-chlorrine and tear, followed by the more lethal mustard and phosgene was tried by the French, allies and the Germans, alike. It was a decade seared by the most horrible war the world had ever known. When the fighting stopped, Victorian innocence had expired and the modern world begun.”