The Great War shattered almost every expectation. Most Europeans believed in the late summer of 1914 that “the boys will be home by Christmas,” but instead the war ground relentlessly on for more than four years before ending in a German defeat in November 1918. At the beginning, most military experts expected a war of movement and attack, but armies on the western front soon became bogged down in a war of attrition; combatants engaging in trench warfare experienced enormous casualties while gaining or losing only a few yards of muddy, blood-soaked ground. Extended battles lasting months—such as those at Verdun and the Somme in France—generated casualties of a million or more each, as the destructive potential of industrialized warfare made itself tragically felt. Moreover, everywhere the conflict became a “total war,” requiring the mobilization of each country’s entire population. Thus the authority of governments expanded greatly. The German state, for example, assumed such control over the economy that its policies became known as “war socialism.” Vast propaganda campaigns sought to arouse citizens by depicting a cruel and inhuman enemy who killed innocent children and violated women. Labor unions agreed to suspend strikes and accept sacrifices for the common good, while women, replacing the men who had left the factories for the battlefront, temporarily abandoned the struggle for the vote.

No less surprising were the longer-term outcomes of the war. In the European cockpit of that conflict, unprecedented casualties, particularly among elite and well-educated groups, and physical destruction, especially in France, led to a widespread disillusionment among intellectuals with their own civilization. The war seemed to mock the Enlightenment values of progress, tolerance, and rationality. Who could believe any longer that the West was superior or that its vaunted science and technology were unquestionably good things? In the most famous novel to emerge from the war, the German veteran Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front, one soldier expressed what many no doubt felt: “It must all be lies and of no account when the culture of a thousand years could not prevent this stream of blood being poured out.”

The aftermath of war also brought substantial social and cultural changes to ordinary Europeans and Americans. Integrating millions of returning veterans into civilian life was no easy task, for they had experienced horrors almost beyond imagination. Governments sought to accommodate them, in Britain for example, with housing programs called “homes for heroes” emphasizing traditional family values. Women were urged to leave factory work and return to their homes, where they would not compete for “men’s jobs.” French authorities proclaimed Mother’s Day as a new holiday, designed to encourage childbearing and thus replace the millions lost in the war.

Nonetheless, the war had loosened the hold of tradition in various ways. Enormous casualties promoted social mobility, allowing the less exalted to move into positions previously dominated by the upper classes. As the war ended, suffrage movements revived and women received the right to vote in a number of countries—Britain, the United States, Germany, the Soviet Union, Hungary, and Poland—in part perhaps because of the sacrifices they had made during the conflict. Young middle-class women, sometimes known as “flappers,” began to flout convention by smoking, dancing, appearing at nightclubs, drinking hard liquor, cutting their hair short, wearing revealing clothing, and generally expressing a more open sexuality. A new consumerism encouraged those who could to acquire cars, washing machines, vacuum cleaners, electric irons, gas ovens, and other newly available products. Radio and the movies now became vehicles of popular culture, transmitting American jazz to Europe and turning Hollywood stars into international celebrities.

The war also transformed international political life. From the collapse of the German, Russian, and Austro-Hungarian empires emerged a new map of Central Europe with an independent Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Yugoslavia as well as other newly independent nations (see Map 20.3). Such new states were based on the principle of “national self-determination,” a concept championed by U.S. president Woodrow Wilson, but each of them also contained dissatisfied ethnic minorities, who claimed the same principle. In Russia, the strains of war triggered a vast revolutionary upheaval that brought the radical Bolsheviks to power in 1917 and took Russia out of the war. Thus was launched world communism, which was to play such a prominent role in the history of the twentieth century (see Chapter 21).

The Treaty of Versailles, which formally concluded the war in 1919, proved in retrospect to have established conditions that contributed to a second world war only twenty years later. In that treaty, Germany lost its colonial empire and 15 percent of its European territory, was required to pay heavy reparations to the winners, had its military forces severely restricted, and was required to accept sole responsibility for the outbreak of the war. All of this created immense resentment in Germany. One of the country’s many demobilized and disillusioned soldiers declared in 1922: “It cannot be that two million Germans should have fallen in vain…. No, we do not pardon, we demand—vengeance.”2 His name was Adolf Hitler, and within two decades he had begun to exact that vengeance.

The Great War generated profound changes in the world beyond Europe as well. During the conflict, Ottoman authorities, suspecting that some of their Armenian subjects were collaborating with the Russian enemy, massacred or deported an estimated 1 million Armenians. Although the term “genocide” had not yet been invented, some historians have applied it to those atrocities, arguing that they established a precedent on which the Nazis later built. The war also brought a final end to a declining Ottoman Empire, creating the modern map of the Middle East, with the new states of Turkey, Syria, Iraq, Transjordan, and Palestine. Thus Arabs emerged from Turkish rule, but many of them were governed for a time by the British or French, as “mandates” of the League of Nations (see Map 20.3). Conflicting British promises to both Arabs and Jews regarding Palestine set the stage for an enduring struggle over that ancient and holy land. Although Latin American countries remained bystanders in the war, many of them benefited from the growing demand for their primary products such as Chilean nitrates, used in explosives. But the sharp drop in nitrate exports after the war ended brought to Chile mass unemployment, urban riots, bloody strikes, and some appeal for the newly established Chilean Communist Party.

In the world of European colonies, the war echoed loudly. Millions of Asian and African men had watched Europeans butcher one another without mercy, had gained new military skills and political awareness, and returned home with less respect for their rulers and with expectations for better treatment as a reward for their service. To gain Indian support for the war, the British had publicly promised to put that colony on the road to self-government, an announcement that set the stage for the independence struggle that followed. In East Asia, Japan emerged strengthened from the war, with European support for its claim to take over German territory and privileges in China. That news enraged Chinese nationalists and among a few sparked an interest in Soviet-style communism, for only the new communist rulers of Russia seemed willing to end the imperialist penetration of China.

Finally, the First World War brought the United States to center stage as a global power. Its manpower had contributed much to the defeat of Germany, and its financial resources turned the United States from a debtor nation into Europe’s creditor. When the American president Woodrow Wilson arrived in Paris for the peace conference in 1919, he was greeted with an almost religious enthusiasm. His famous Fourteen Points seemed to herald a new kind of international life, one based on moral principles rather than secret deals and imperialist machinations. Particularly appealing to many was his idea for the League of Nations, a new international peacekeeping organization committed to the principle of “collective security” and intended to avoid any repetition of the horrors that had just ended. Wilson’s idealistic vision largely failed, however. Germany was treated more harshly than he had wished. And in his own country, the U.S. Senate refused to join the League, on which Wilson had pinned his hopes for a lasting peace. Its opponents feared that Americans would be forced to bow to “the will of other nations.” That refusal seriously weakened the League of Nations as a vehicle for a new international order.