One of only two wars to make this list, this one does because of the hideous speed at which hostilities escalated in 1914, and because there is no single villain to blame. Humanity in general is to blame for this one. In retrospect, it appears as if every country in Europe was harboring a festering hatred for one another, and everyone was looking for an excuse to invade. The act that touched it off was the assassination of Franz Ferdinand, Archduke of Austria-Este, by Gavrilo Princip, whose motive was no more complicated than a desire to prove his bravery to the Serbian army, which had rejected him for being too small and weak.
Almost every nation in Europe had a treaty with another nation, and these treaties all said the same thing: if anyone attacks you, we’ve got your back. Austro-Hungary declared war on Serbia, which prompted Russia to declare war on Austro-Hungary, which prompted Germany and Italy to declare war on Russia, which prompted the United Kingdom and France to declare war on Germany and Italy. Spain and, of course, Switzerland stayed out of it.
The United States stayed out of it until Germany waged total war on international unarmed merchant ships, particularly Lusitania, and because of the Zimmermann Telegram which Germany sent to Mexico, urging it to declare war on the U. S. The British intercepted this memo, but Mexico, to its credit, did not dare attack the U. S.
We can all agree that war is the epitome of human stupidity, and as wars go, WWI may be insurmountable in exemplary idiocy. War theory, if we may call it that, had progressed in terms of modern defense, but not attack: both sides were armed with more or less the very same weaponry, especially the Maxim machine gun, the first truly modern machine gun. It is belt-fed, fires the .303 British, the 8mm Mauser, or the 7.62 NATO, at a rate of 450 to 500 rounds per minute, sufficient to cut men in half, which is precisely what it did tens of thousands of times for 4 years.
The British, French, Germans, Russians, and Americans all had them, and for the first 2 and a half years, the trench warfare involved one side charging out across 100 to 1000 yards of no-man’s land, through shell craters, barbed wire, mud and mines, right into the waiting machine gun lines of the enemy trenches. Each time one side was beaten back with severe losses, the other side thought there would be a weakness and charged after them, right into waiting machine gun lines. Kaiser Wilhelm sent a telegram in late 1914 to his cousin, Tsar Nicholas II, that read, in Russian, “Nicky, how can we stop this?”
On the first day of the Battle of the Somme River, 1 July 1916, the middle day of the middle year of the Great War, as it was called before 1939, the British conducted the European Slow March, walking, not running, toward the Germans, on the theory that the slower they advanced, the more difficult they would be to hit, and more fearsome they would be to the enemy. After 12 hours, 19,240 British soldiers lay dead in about 25 square miles. This was the most lethal day in the British military’s history.
The Somme was begun in an attempt to draw men of both sides away from the Battle of Verdun, so a decision there could be attained. Instead, the Somme became an even larger battle in scale, and it and Verdun remain the most epic of the War. 698,000 men died at Verdun, 70,000 per month for 10 months. Over 300,000 died at the Somme. Each battle resulted in over 1 million casualties, the debut of the modern flamethrower at Verdun, and the tank at the Somme.
The Germans opened hostilities at Verdun with a 10-hour cannonade of 808 artillery pieces, firing almost 1 million shells, some as wide as steering wheels. Around the French fortifications, the blackened skeletons of trees were festooned with human and horse intestines. The Germans also used ample supplies of mustard gas in both battles. Mustard gas is essentially aerosol hydrochloric acid. One breath of it can kill a man by internal drowning. It also severely burns and blisters skin and blinds eyes.
Both battles ended in utter stalemate, because mobility had not progressed on par with firepower, and that lack of mobility, especially on the first day of the Somme, displayed more directly than any other action in any war the utter futility and insanity of warfare. Neither side could approach the other, but the Germans found their losses more irreplaceable than the combined French and British. When the Americans showed up, the Germans simply could not cope with the overwhelming enemy men and materiel for much longer. About 15 million, military and civilian, died, unless we include deaths from Spanish influenza, which was itself a direct result of the War. That puts the estimate at about 65 million.