Yes, It Could Happen Again
Instability in Ukraine, chaos in Syria, conflict in the East China Sea—the trigger points for World War III are in place.
World War I
In This Issue
Coverage by H.G. Wells, Gertrude Stein, W.E.B. DuBois, H.L. Mencken, Reinhold Niebuhr, Bertrand Russell, and more—plus dramatic images and new essays
Essays
Why Don’t Americans Remember the War?
The Allies would not have won without doughboys, materiel, and money.
How the Great War Shaped the World
The trauma of 1914–18 forever changed geopolitical boundaries, the science of killing, and the meaning of war.
The War, Year by Year
A timeline
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Subscribers can access PDF versions of every issue in The Atlantic archive. When you subscribe, you’ll not only enjoy all of The Atlantic’s writing, past and present; you’ll also be supporting a bright future for our journalism.1. War Breaks Out
Berliner Verlag/Archiv/Picture-Alliance/DPA/AP Is a Permanent Peace Possible?
The fighting in Europe prompted a noted British philosopher and pacifist to trace the “cruel absurdities” that had produced a world war—and to hope for peaceful means to settle future disputes.
A War to Prevent War
Archduke Ferdinand's assassination served as a pretext for an "immoral" preventive war.
Associated Press Who Started the War?
Europeans had no desire to fight one another. Only after a score of men drove their nations into battle did their peoples learn to hate.
Picture-Alliance/DPA/AP The Insane Root
Even the lowest of the carnivorous animals do not kill members of their own species for no good reason.
Associated Press Autocracy Versus Liberty
The author, a former president of Harvard, framed the question he believed would decide the war: Would conscripted workers produce as strong an economy as those who could act of their own free will?
Associated Press A Diplomats' War
If the public can make decisions about taxes and schools, why not about war?
ADOC/Corbis The African Roots of War
After Belgium, France, and Britain carved up Africa among themselves, Germany felt the need to catch up. W. E. B. Du Bois, who by 1915 had established himself as one of America’s leading writers and civil-rights activists, saw this competition for colonies as an underlying cause of the war.
Hulton-Deutsch Collection/Corbis The Need for Naval Imagination
An American writer and Naval Academy graduate placed the fate of Britain and the United States on the high seas.
Greed Caused the War
Poor nations didn't plunge the world into war. Rich nations that coveted even greater riches did.
Bettmann/Corbis The Mailed Fist and Its Prophet
H. L. Mencken, a prominent German American journalist with reactionary racial views, was a frank admirer of Friedrich Nietzsche. Here he explained how Nietzsche heaped scorn upon Germans before they adopted him as a spokesman for their collective soul.
Stefan Sauer/Picture-Alliance/DPA/AP War Is Someone Else's Fault
How nations that go to war perceive themselves
Berliner Verlag/Archiv/Picture-Alliance/DPA/AP The Kaiser and His People
The German monarch embodied “a new idealism,” exalting hard work and good government, according to this report by a German-born historian at Harvard.
Jürgen Diener/DPA/Corbis 'The Future Belongs to the White Race'
In a 1908 Century Magazine interview, suppressed by Germany, Kaiser Wilhelm II revealed his beliefs on white supremacy and on the historical role of great leaders.
Zimmer/Picture-Alliance/DPA/AP Was the Great War Necessary?
In Britain today, many see the war as a slaughter without necessity or meaning. But a great deal was at stake.
2. In the Trenches
Print Collector/Corbis The Cross at Neuve-Chapelle
At a village near the northern tip of France, the symbol of Christ caused Allied soldiers’ deaths.
ADOC/Corbis Preparing to Die
An American serving in the French Foreign Legion arranged his worldly affairs before a “grand attack.”
George H. Mewes/National Geographic Society/Corbis The Enemy as Vermin
Russian soldiers saw nothing evil in leaving the bodies of Germans and Austrians on the battlefield to rot.
ADOC/Corbis Corpses in the Drollest Positions
A French officer found that the corpses half-buried in the walls of a trench became a matter of mirth.
ADOC/Corbis Subterranean Life
Trenches were crowded, narrow cities replete with bunks, benches, and sewage systems.
Hulton-Deutsch Collection/Corbis All for a Few Feet of France
A French officer witnesses the chaos of battle.
Hulton-Deutsch Collection/Corbis The Flower of Youth, Mangled and Maimed
The chief officer of a British ship was sickened by burying so many young men at sea.
Bettmann/Corbis Left to Die in Flanders Fields
Abandoned in no-man's-land, some wounded men spent days crawling to safety.
Berliner Verlag/Archiv/DPA/Corbis The Battle of Verdun
At a fortress town in northeastern France, the German army repeatedly tried to break through Allied lines, in one of the greatest dramas of the war.
Corbis Verdun, Before and After
A beautiful town brought to ruin
Associated Press Silence at Verdun
How a lush countryside came to resemble the surface of the moon
Corbis Has the War Affected the Weather?
A meteorologist investigated whether explosions and gunfire were causing climate change.
“All The World Is Tired Here”
Diary entries from Mont Blond, in northern France, which was stormed by French and Moroccan troops in May 1917
National Archives Science at the Front
Geologists, meteorologists, and chemists helped make their nations’ armies more lethal.
Bettmann/Corbis In Defense of Gas Warfare
Noxious chemicals have been used in battle since at least ancient Greece. They are more economical—and more humane—than any other weapon, one writer argued.
Underwood & Underwood/Corbis The Deserter
Perhaps cowardice had motivated him, a British conscript conceded—or a “primitive kind of common sense.”
Hulton-Deutsch Collection/Corbis In a German Prison Camp
At Wittenberg, in eastern Germany, the war against lice
91040/DPA/Corbis A Gentleman Unafraid
In a series of letters to his mother, an American fighting with the Canadian army in France described how his love of family and his religious faith had prepared him for his fate.
Associated Press “A Soundless River of Peace”
When the armistice ending the Great War was signed on November 11, 1918, the victorious capitals erupted in celebration. On the battlefront, the soldiers fell silent.
3. The Home Front
National Archives Waiting
The editor of The Atlantic from 1909 to 1938 called on the United States to abandon its neutrality and enter the war “purely for a world idea.”
Bettmann/Corbis Our Divided Country
The outbreak of a European war was perplexing for a nation of (mostly European) immigrants. “Hyphenated Americans” faced suspicions about their allegiances.
National Archives The End of Isolation
Americans had always kept aloof from Europe’s affairs, in the hope that Europe would stay out of theirs. Woodrow Wilson declared: no more.
Corbis To Right Wrongs
Only the United States sought nothing selfish or commercial from going to war.
Associated Press The Wives of German Americans
How nationalistic fervor broke up a happy home
Bettmann/Corbis The Threatened Eclipse of Free Speech
A plea to distinguish idealists from traitors
Bettmann/Corbis Our Soldiers
In the West Virginia hamlet of Dry Creek, household after household delivered its sons to war.
Corbis Hemingway Goes to War
A Kansas City Star reporter deemed unfit for military service found a spot as an ambulance driver at the Italian front. Days later, he got hit by a mortar shell and machine-gun fire.
Associated Press The War and Gertrude Stein
Dining in Paris with Picasso as a zeppelin loomed overhead
Bettmann/Corbis “The Mouth of Hell Had Been Opened”
The writer watched as a zeppelin dropped incendiary bombs on a town in Great Britain.
Keystone/Corbis The Decline of the Berliner
Before the war, Germans were jovial and hospitable to foreigners. But after it started, they displayed growing intolerance and savagery.
Hulton-Deutsch Collection/Corbis War and the Sexes
With millions of young men gone to their graves or sickbeds, the marital future of women across Europe looked bleak.
4. A New World
Hulton-Deutsch Collection/Corbis The Idea of a League of Nations
Horror at the Great War, along with technological change, made the idea of world government imaginable.
The Secret to World Peace
Nations must give up their absolute sovereignty over foreign affairs.
Associated Press Woodrow Wilson at Versailles
The president's physician witnessed the drama behind closed doors at the peace conference.
Associated Press The Case of Woodrow Wilson
A popular historian agreed with Freud that Wilson was a tragic figure whose neuroses got in his way.
Corbis When Utopia Looked Real
Creating a League of Nations looked like a fool's errand until the American president had his say.
Corbis Redrawing the Map of Europe
After the postwar treaty scrambled boundary lines across Europe, Germans would resent their nation's "mutilation."
Associated Press The Failure in Versailles
The unprincipled peace bore little resemblance to President Wilson's idealistic hopes.
Bettman/Corbis Europe's Future: Economic Union
A prominent British historian predicted that Europe would become more politically fragmented but more economically united.
Berliner Verlag/Archiv/Corbis Hitler, Reduced to Impotence
The political division within postwar Germany produced a "noisy right wing," led in part by a Great War veteran named Adolf Hitler.
Bettman/Corbis Germany's Lost Generation
The Germans who came of age after the Great War cursed their ruined economy and the stigma of war guilt.
Berliner Verlag/Archiv/Picture-Alliance/DPA/AP Probabilities of War in Europe
A decade after the war, dictators still ruled, and more men were under arms than ever before.
Associated Press From Postwar to Prewar
Not long after the League of Nations failed, Europe and the United States again found themselves bracing for war.
STR/Pakistan/Reuters/Corbis The Lines Across the Middle East
The boundaries that the Allies' mapmakers drew during the war created conflicts that persist a century later.
Michael St. Maur Sheil Life After Death
Comrades remain comrades, said an American pilot, even after they fall.
Editor's Note
Bettmann/Corbis The American Idea at War
One can draw a line from September 11, 2001, straight back to the decisions made by colonial mapmakers as the fighting raged in Europe 100 years ago.
Photo Essay
K.J. Historical/Corbis; David Pollack/Corbis; Swim Ink 2/Corbis; Heritage/Corbis; Corbis The Art of War
As societies mobilized for an unexpected and undesired war, governments used posters as a propaganda tool.
