A Short History of the Great War

On 28 June 1914 the Archduke Francis Ferdinand, heir-presumptive to the Hapsburg throne, was shot in the streets of Serajevo, the capital of the Austrian province of Bosnia. Red...

Germany began the war on the Western front before it was declared, and on 1-2 August German cavalry crossed the French frontier between Luxemburg and Switzerland at three points...

The first month of the war in the West had coincided more nearly with German plans than with Entente hopes, but both Germany and the Western Allies agreed in miscalculating Russ...

The declaration of war by Great Britain on 4 August converted the conflict into one unlike any other that had been waged since Napoleon was sent to St. Helena in 1815; and sea-p...

Throughout the war there was an undercurrent of criticism against the dispersion of British forces and dissipation of British energy, and the briefest history of it cannot avoid...

The lull which followed the battle of Ypres was not entirely due to the winter season or to the Flanders mud, for both sides had other reasons for quiescence in the West. The Ge...

Effective and timely military co-operation had been denied to the naval attack on the Dardanelles because our available forces had been mortgaged since January to an allied offe...

THE winter, spring, and summer which had passed with so little change on the other fronts, owed their lack of decisive movement not to the comforting delusion of the French offi...

No one's eyes had been more keenly trained on the Dardanelles operations during the spring and summer than those of Ferdinand, King and Tsar of Bulgaria. Descended from Orleanis...

The failure of the Entente offensives in the Dardanelles and in France had at last convinced the public of the truth of Lord Kitchener's prophecy, that the war would be long if...

It was a commonplace of the old diplomacy that the most effective way to deceive a rival diplomatist was to tell him the truth, and similar conditions enabled the Germans to del...

In spite of the disasters she had suffered in 1915 and of her winter campaigns in Galicia and the Caucasus, Russia was the first of the Allies to take the offensive in 1916. She...

The combined offensive of the Allies in 1916 was not limited to the Russian, French, and Italian fronts, and there is a diplomatic story that when the battle of the Somme seemed...

The German presentiment of disaster was justified by events in the spring of 1917, and the new British Government seemed to have come in on a flowing tide. In spite of the gloom...

Among the events which gave so brilliant a promise to the spring of 1917, not the least was the revolution in Russia. From the first, indeed, there was anxiety about the effect...

THE breakdown of the strategical offensive of the Entente in the spring of 1917 was almost complete. Russia had gone her own way to military insignificance, France had failed in...

Two gleams of light, one of them quickly dimmed and the other distant, relieved the gloom of the last winter of the war. As the Flanders offensive subsided in the mud, Haig was...

More than two years before the war concluded a junior officer from the front remarked that he could not say when, but knew where, it would end, and that was not far from our exi...

There were a few people in England who had some inkling on 18 July that it might prove a turning-point in history. Foch's simple piety had led him into what was almost an indisc...

Destruction is easier and more rapid than construction, and it needs a wiser man and a longer labour to make peace than war. War begins with the first blow, but peace is not mad...