by Perry McCarney

Created on: October 03, 2008   Last Updated: June 02, 2011

The First World War was known at the time as the Great War. It was also commonly referred to by politicians, both during and after, as the "War to End All Wars". Looking back from 2008 and quite obviously even earlier, such a title is bitterly ironic. The appalling numbers of the dead, both military and civilian, and those devastated by injury or grief, are blatant and clear victims of this war that so dramatically impacted the world. But are they the only casualties of this war that entrapped nations both willing and reluctant?

At the turn of the 20th
century the nations of Europe believed they had reached a golden era. Patent offices in some countries actually closed, believing that all that could be discovered already had been. It was the general belief of the populaces of the world powers of the time, predominantly European, that large-scale warfare was a thing of the past. Minor conflicts may occur over political dominance in far flung countries to determine whose colony they would be, but that nothing major would ever again occur in the civilised nations of Europe. That the conflicts of the Napoleonic Wars of 1805 to 1815 would be the last time large armies would traverse and battle over the lands of Europe.

Instead, the assasination of a prince, Franz Ferdinand, the crown prince of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, proved the trigger to a conflagration that encompassed all of Europe and impacted many other parts of the world as well.

The numbers of dead and wounded are the obvious casualties, 10 million dead soldiers, 21 million soldiers wounded, a significant proportion crippled for life, and possibly recognised for the first time, nine million, possibly many more, civilians killed. Where military antagonism had previously made at least some attempt to avoid civilian casualties, the Great War utilised military technologies that failed to differentiate between military personnel and civilians. And the command staffs on both sides discarded their concepts of honour and chivalry to try and obtain victory. The general staffs went so far as to discount civilian casualties altogether; as the Zeppelin bombing attacks on London show.

The military casualties more than decimated the generation of young men of every nation involved. The literal meaning of "to decimate" is to kill one in ten, it comes from the punishment inflicted on Roman legions that failed on or retreated from the field of combat. One man out of every ten from such legions was killed as a punishment

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