Post by FWS on Jun 22, 2014 9:57:26 GMT -6
How World War I gave us 'cooties'
By Jonathan Lighter
CNN
Fri June 20, 2014
French soldiers sing the national anthem at the beginning of World War I in August 1914. This "war to end all wars" might seem like ancient history, but it changed the world forever. It transformed the way war was fought, upended cultures and home life and stimulated innovations that affect us today. With more than 30 combatant nations and nearly 70 million men mobilized, World War I profoundly destabilized the international order. Look back at some of the war's key events.
Editor's note: This is the second in a series on the legacies of World War I. It will appear on CNN.com/Opinion in the weeks leading up to the 100-year anniversary of the war's outbreak in August. Jonathan Lighter is research professor of English at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. He has written on war fiction and movies for the journal War, Literature & the Arts. His monograph on the language of World War I appeared in the journal American Speech, and he is editor of the Random House Historical Dictionary of American Slang.
(CNN) -- The Brits called it the "Great War." To the Yanks, it was the "World War." No one wanted to think there could be a second. Though World War I, which began 100 years ago next month, devastated lives and landscapes, its effect on language was almost paradoxically positive. It spawned hundreds of new words and popularized scores of old ones. Many of them survive today -- there are "cooties," "camouflage," "scrounge" and "dud," for example -- but many have lost their once-widely recognized associations with the war that was hoped would "end war."
Total war, as the world twice found out in the past century, is a turbulent time. It is for language, too. As new concerns, new methods, new technologies and new experiences multiply, vocabulary by necessity tries to keep up.
Obscure old words can get a new lease on life. World War I gave the English language new terms as varied as "blimp" and "Boches" and "devil dog" and even "D-Day." It popularized military slang like "doughboy" and "fed up." It dragooned older terms for wider application, such as "Yank" and "no-man's land."
Some words prominent in 1914-18 have pretty much fallen from use. Others remain as well-known as the war's idealistic slogans, like H. G. Wells' call for "a war to end wars" and Woodrow Wilson's to make the world "safe for democracy."
WAR'S LASTING LEGACY
The first World War began August 4, 1914, in the wake of the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria-Hungary on June 28 of that year. In the next two months, CNN.com/Opinion will feature articles on the weapons of war, its language, the role of women, battlefield injuries and the rise of aerial surveillance.
As a multilingual war, it promptly enriched the English language with terms of international origin. Air reconnaissance made military and naval "camouflage," another French word, a necessity. The same might be said of the French 75 cocktail, named for the war's most effective artillery piece. And historians writing in English still use the Gallic "poilu" for a French combat soldier and "Boches" for the Germans.
Older terms and nicknames sometimes gained new popularity that guaranteed they'd remain in English long after soldiers returned home. George M. Cohan's smash hit "Over There" (1917) was the catchiest American patriotic song ever, and when he wrote that "The Yanks are coming," he followed the British, not the American, use of the Civil War term to encompass all Americans, north and south of the Mason-Dixon Line.
"Doughboy" was a new one on most people, but it had meant an infantryman since the Mexican-American War of the 1840s, for no very clear reason; now, it's the usual synonym for the American soldier of the First World War. "Leatherneck," which also looked new but wasn't, denoted the U.S. Marine, whose 19th-century uniform had featured a high leather collar that sailors ridiculed.
A Wisconsin newspaper claimed in 1918 that the Germans thought American Marines fought like Teufelhunden, or "devil dogs"; the supposedly German word sounds ersatz, but the English version is still heard in the Corps. (Sailors were "gobs"; fliers were "birdmen"; pals were "buddies": all pre-war, all truly mainstream for the first time in 1914-18.) "G.I.," which meant only "galvanized iron" and "government issue" in World War I, eventually became the World War II term for a U.S. soldier.
The everyday life of those soldiers spawned many words and expressions. When kids talk of "cooties," they don't realize what everyone knew by 1918: It was a new term for lice, which burrowed into the clothes of any and all who served on the front lines. "Chow," for food, owes its popularity mostly to the U.S. military of World War I. From the British came the expressions "to scrounge" (to search for and, if necessary, pilfer), "cushy" (enviably comfortable) and "fed up" (disgusted with it all), three salient soldier concepts in any war.
From the British came the expressions to 'scrounge' (to search for and, if necessary, pilfer), 'cushy' (enviably comfortable) and 'fed up' (disgusted with it all), three salient soldier concepts in any war.
Trench warfare became a sinister science, as front-line troops of every army hunkered down for hundreds of miles in conditions of appalling filth and danger. Playwright George Bernard Shaw, an opponent of the war, popularized the once-uncommon phrase "cannon fodder," which suggested that soldiers of all nations had been impersonally requisitioned to feed the guns or duped into enlisting by interchangeably imperialist rulers.
To name what lay between the entrenched armies, modern English enlisted a phrase from the Middle Ages: "no-man's land." The shell-pocked muck between the opposing trenches, bounded by rotting sandbags and rusted heaps of barbed wire, gave the 14th-century meaning of "unowned or uninhabited territory" a much grimmer connotation.
Before World War I, a "dud" was anything or anybody unsatisfactory, but by the time the conflict ended, "dud" referred chiefly to an unexploded shell or bomb, as it does to this day. The British began speaking of defensive "foxholes," dug not by foxes but by soldiers on the battlefield, a word that now may seem as old as shooting wars themselves.
The adjustment of a rifle's battle-sight was "zeroing in," a metaphor today's English can't do without. Then there's "D-Day": the very first was September 26, 1918, the starting date of the war-ending Allied offensive in the Argonne Forest.
Familiar now as an advertising platform, the helium-filled "blimp" was invented for naval observation in 1915. The British came up with the armored "tank" and named it arbitrarily to keep the weapon secret before its surprise appearance in the Battle of the Somme in 1916.
The threat of "chemical warfare" and "chemical weapons" had been discussed in the press, but their actual use by Germany in 1915, first in Poland and then in Belgium, raised the war's quotient of barbarism. The Allies quickly followed suit. "Air raids," which began on a small scale in 1914, were carried out by four-winged bombers and German Zeppelins.
The idea of bomb-laden squadrons of Zeppelins over London may seem like something from Victorian science fiction, and it was novelist H.G. Wells (author of "War of the Worlds") who invented the most ominous phrase of all.
In 1914, he imagined a device that might appear within a generation, whose destructive power would change everything forever. Wells warned that eventually "any little body of malcontents could use it." As though in prophecy of the long shadow the 1914-18 war would cast on the 20th century, Wells coined a now-familiar term for his imaginary superweapon that he believed could easily "wreck half a city."
He called it "the atomic bomb."
How a century-old war affects you
By Ruth Ben-Ghiat
CNN
Sun June 15, 2014
Editor's note: This is the first in a series on the legacies of World War I. It will appear on CNN.com/OPINION in the weeks leading up to the 100-year anniversary of the war's outbreak in August. Ruth Ben-Ghiat, guest editor for the series, is a professor of history and Italian studies at New York University. A specialist in 20th century European and Italian history, she writes and lectures on the world wars, dictatorships and empire. Her forthcoming book (January 2015) is "Italian Fascism's Empire Cinema." The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of the author.
(CNN) -- World War I began a hundred years ago this summer, but for many of us it might as well be a thousand. We know it, if we know it at all, as a dimly remembered chapter in high school history, or as scenes from old black-and-white movies of soldiers hunkered in trenches doing battle with Germans in pointy helmets. It was all too real for more than 65 million men from some 30 nations who were plunged into carnage the likes of which the world had never before seen.
Every one of those soldiers is dead, and the causes they fought for are lost on many of us. Yet this "war to end all wars" is not a remote event. In fact, World War I changed the world forever, and its effects are all around us.
To begin with, it rewrote history at the grandest level: Empires fell, and new nations--Austria, Hungary, Yugoslavia and Poland among them-- were born in the ashes. Leaders of the still-powerful French and British empires used the conflict to redraw borders in ways that set the stage for future conflicts that stretch on today, in the Middle East, for example.
WAR'S LASTING LEGACY
The first World War began August 4, 1914, in the wake of the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria-Hungary on June 28 of that year. In the next two months, CNN.com/Opinion will feature articles on the weapons of war, its language, the role of women, battlefield injuries and the rise of aerial surveillance.
But there is much more. The first mass conflict among industrialized nations, World War I upended the way war was fought. The weapons it introduced -- submarines, machine guns, poison gas, grenades, tanks -- are all still part of our arsenals. And it was World War I that made airpower and strategic bombing central to the success of any future war. Trench warfare traumatized both soldiers and landscapes, and informed art and literature for years. It would reappear as a battlefield strategy in both the Korean War and in the Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s.
At home and on the battlefield, World War I put new objects and words into circulation: "cooties" are something no kid wants to get, but for GIs in the trenches, they were real and they were lice; and sanitary napkins developed from the handy alternative use nurses found for cellulose bandage material produced for the war. The war popularized Kleenex and tea bags and zippers.
In fact, every time you admire an aircraft carrier, eat a meatless sausage, sit under a sun lamp, wear a Burberry trench coat, or set your clock ahead for daylight saving time, you are reaching back to commune with World War I.
The dawn of chemical weapons
World War I's new weapons caused previously unseen and horrific kinds of injuries, and scientists raced to develop protections against them -- or to make even more lethal versions to use against the enemy. Poison gas was first used on a mass scale by the Germans in April 1915 during the second battle of Ypres, and cloths strapped over the mouth and nose were at first the only protection.
Gas masks evolved quickly, though, and by the end of the war even some horses and dogs at the front had their own. The horrors of gas attacks resonate today in the reports of chemical weapons use in Syria, and, earlier, in Saddam Hussein's Iraq, and the world still struggles to contain them.
All told, more than 9 million died in the conflict, and 21 million were wounded, psychologically scarring a generation. Soldiers were at pains to explain this new human experience of battle to those back home.
The English poet Siegfried Sassoon had this to say in 1917 about his time at the front: "I'm back from hell/With loathsome thoughts to sell/Secrets of death to tell;/ And horrors from the abyss." Many others had no more words: these victims of "war exhaustion," (the label of shell shock became more common) had trouble speaking: they are the forefathers of veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder today.
"Every time you admire an aircraft carrier, eat a meatless sausage, sit under a sun lamp, wear a Burberry trench coat, or set your clock ahead for daylight saving time, you are reaching back to commune with World War I."
Likewise the scale and type of physical injuries challenged the ingenuity of prosthesis designers, whose work to replace lost body parts would enable countless soldiers to return to productive civilian life, a process echoed today as soldiers from recent wars recover from the toll of roadside bombs.
World War I also set the stage for future conflicts, by breaking down barriers between military and civilian life. While soldiers fought at the battlefront, civilian women and men built their weapons, distributed food and propaganda, and kept the home front running. Women gained new visibility in society, moving into the jobs vacated by enlisted men.
They drove streetcars, smelted iron, built bombs and then, after a long day at the factory, scrounged for food for their families. Civilians working for the war effort meant that anyone could be a target: German Fokker planes attacked at the front, but Zeppelin airships bombed London and Paris. "Total war" made the home front a dangerous place.
This war left few things unchanged in its path, even in lands that saw no fighting. Although it was mainly fought in Europe, it awakened many to the scope and diversity of the planet. "The entire world is participating in the war!" a French almanac exclaimed in 1917, showing its readers a map of the world divided into enemy, ally, and neutral peoples. Whether as laborers or soldiers, Europeans went to other countries, and millions of Americans, Africans and Asians came to Europe.
'Trapped in a net of woe'
More than two million United States soldiers fought in Europe, and the British and French empires brought over their colonial subjects. "We perish in the desert; you wash yourself and lie in bed," wrote an Indian soldier to his wife in September 1915. "We are trapped in a net of woe; while you go free. Our life is a living death."
How did Europe arrive at this state of catastrophe? The assassination of Austrian-Hungarian Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife, Sophie, on June 28, 1914 by the Bosnian Serb Gavrilo Princip caused an international crisis that led in just over a month to multiple mobilizations.
The Archduke, traveling in an open car, was in Sarajevo to inspect imperial armed forces in Bosnia and Herzegovina, which were among the former Ottoman territories annexed by Austria-Hungary in 1908, angering Serbian nationalists such as Princip.
"The scale and type of physical injuries challenged the ingenuity of prosthesis designers, whose work to replace lost body parts would enable countless soldiers to return to productive civilian life."
After the assassination, Austria-Hungary gave Serbia an ultimatum, causing Russia to intervene to protect its Serbian client state, and Germany to help its Austrian ally. And so it all began: the military obligations imposed by the system of alliances drew one power after another into combat.
All parties thought the war would be a short one; none imagined the speed with which the conflict would degenerate into a series of local atrocities (the Belgians became the conflict's first group of refugees, as they fled German rape and plunder) and mass slaughter across many fronts.
The habituation to violence and the acceptance of these lethal new inventions is one of World War I's most unfortunate legacies. Chemical weapons provides a case in point. Their effectiveness, as proved by the precedent of World War I, has given them a permanent place in many state arsenals, despite the paper trail of international agreements meant to ban their use. Democracies and dictatorships (France and Italy) both used them in the interwar period as agents of colonial conquest and rule, and Syria is the most recent example of their use.
As we approach this 100-year anniversary, each combatant country is remembering the war in its own way. In America, the echo has been fainter, due as much to the country's late entry into the war (April 1917) as to the prominence of World War II.
"The First World War is not well understood or remembered in the United States, U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates said at a 2008 Veterans Day ceremony at which the last living American combatant, Frank Buckles, who died in 2011, was present. "Yet few events have so markedly shaped the world we live in."
At war's end in 1918, America emerged from its 18 months of combat with a raft of new legislation that is still in force -- such as the Selective Service Act, which still today allows the President to draft soldiers, and the Espionage Act, used recently to charge Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden -- and with a new status as an international power.
A century of debates over how and whether America should intervene in global crises would lie ahead.
By Jonathan Lighter
CNN
Fri June 20, 2014
French soldiers sing the national anthem at the beginning of World War I in August 1914. This "war to end all wars" might seem like ancient history, but it changed the world forever. It transformed the way war was fought, upended cultures and home life and stimulated innovations that affect us today. With more than 30 combatant nations and nearly 70 million men mobilized, World War I profoundly destabilized the international order. Look back at some of the war's key events.
Editor's note: This is the second in a series on the legacies of World War I. It will appear on CNN.com/Opinion in the weeks leading up to the 100-year anniversary of the war's outbreak in August. Jonathan Lighter is research professor of English at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. He has written on war fiction and movies for the journal War, Literature & the Arts. His monograph on the language of World War I appeared in the journal American Speech, and he is editor of the Random House Historical Dictionary of American Slang.
(CNN) -- The Brits called it the "Great War." To the Yanks, it was the "World War." No one wanted to think there could be a second. Though World War I, which began 100 years ago next month, devastated lives and landscapes, its effect on language was almost paradoxically positive. It spawned hundreds of new words and popularized scores of old ones. Many of them survive today -- there are "cooties," "camouflage," "scrounge" and "dud," for example -- but many have lost their once-widely recognized associations with the war that was hoped would "end war."
Total war, as the world twice found out in the past century, is a turbulent time. It is for language, too. As new concerns, new methods, new technologies and new experiences multiply, vocabulary by necessity tries to keep up.
Obscure old words can get a new lease on life. World War I gave the English language new terms as varied as "blimp" and "Boches" and "devil dog" and even "D-Day." It popularized military slang like "doughboy" and "fed up." It dragooned older terms for wider application, such as "Yank" and "no-man's land."
Some words prominent in 1914-18 have pretty much fallen from use. Others remain as well-known as the war's idealistic slogans, like H. G. Wells' call for "a war to end wars" and Woodrow Wilson's to make the world "safe for democracy."
WAR'S LASTING LEGACY
The first World War began August 4, 1914, in the wake of the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria-Hungary on June 28 of that year. In the next two months, CNN.com/Opinion will feature articles on the weapons of war, its language, the role of women, battlefield injuries and the rise of aerial surveillance.
As a multilingual war, it promptly enriched the English language with terms of international origin. Air reconnaissance made military and naval "camouflage," another French word, a necessity. The same might be said of the French 75 cocktail, named for the war's most effective artillery piece. And historians writing in English still use the Gallic "poilu" for a French combat soldier and "Boches" for the Germans.
Older terms and nicknames sometimes gained new popularity that guaranteed they'd remain in English long after soldiers returned home. George M. Cohan's smash hit "Over There" (1917) was the catchiest American patriotic song ever, and when he wrote that "The Yanks are coming," he followed the British, not the American, use of the Civil War term to encompass all Americans, north and south of the Mason-Dixon Line.
"Doughboy" was a new one on most people, but it had meant an infantryman since the Mexican-American War of the 1840s, for no very clear reason; now, it's the usual synonym for the American soldier of the First World War. "Leatherneck," which also looked new but wasn't, denoted the U.S. Marine, whose 19th-century uniform had featured a high leather collar that sailors ridiculed.
A Wisconsin newspaper claimed in 1918 that the Germans thought American Marines fought like Teufelhunden, or "devil dogs"; the supposedly German word sounds ersatz, but the English version is still heard in the Corps. (Sailors were "gobs"; fliers were "birdmen"; pals were "buddies": all pre-war, all truly mainstream for the first time in 1914-18.) "G.I.," which meant only "galvanized iron" and "government issue" in World War I, eventually became the World War II term for a U.S. soldier.
The everyday life of those soldiers spawned many words and expressions. When kids talk of "cooties," they don't realize what everyone knew by 1918: It was a new term for lice, which burrowed into the clothes of any and all who served on the front lines. "Chow," for food, owes its popularity mostly to the U.S. military of World War I. From the British came the expressions "to scrounge" (to search for and, if necessary, pilfer), "cushy" (enviably comfortable) and "fed up" (disgusted with it all), three salient soldier concepts in any war.
From the British came the expressions to 'scrounge' (to search for and, if necessary, pilfer), 'cushy' (enviably comfortable) and 'fed up' (disgusted with it all), three salient soldier concepts in any war.
Trench warfare became a sinister science, as front-line troops of every army hunkered down for hundreds of miles in conditions of appalling filth and danger. Playwright George Bernard Shaw, an opponent of the war, popularized the once-uncommon phrase "cannon fodder," which suggested that soldiers of all nations had been impersonally requisitioned to feed the guns or duped into enlisting by interchangeably imperialist rulers.
To name what lay between the entrenched armies, modern English enlisted a phrase from the Middle Ages: "no-man's land." The shell-pocked muck between the opposing trenches, bounded by rotting sandbags and rusted heaps of barbed wire, gave the 14th-century meaning of "unowned or uninhabited territory" a much grimmer connotation.
Before World War I, a "dud" was anything or anybody unsatisfactory, but by the time the conflict ended, "dud" referred chiefly to an unexploded shell or bomb, as it does to this day. The British began speaking of defensive "foxholes," dug not by foxes but by soldiers on the battlefield, a word that now may seem as old as shooting wars themselves.
The adjustment of a rifle's battle-sight was "zeroing in," a metaphor today's English can't do without. Then there's "D-Day": the very first was September 26, 1918, the starting date of the war-ending Allied offensive in the Argonne Forest.
Familiar now as an advertising platform, the helium-filled "blimp" was invented for naval observation in 1915. The British came up with the armored "tank" and named it arbitrarily to keep the weapon secret before its surprise appearance in the Battle of the Somme in 1916.
The threat of "chemical warfare" and "chemical weapons" had been discussed in the press, but their actual use by Germany in 1915, first in Poland and then in Belgium, raised the war's quotient of barbarism. The Allies quickly followed suit. "Air raids," which began on a small scale in 1914, were carried out by four-winged bombers and German Zeppelins.
The idea of bomb-laden squadrons of Zeppelins over London may seem like something from Victorian science fiction, and it was novelist H.G. Wells (author of "War of the Worlds") who invented the most ominous phrase of all.
In 1914, he imagined a device that might appear within a generation, whose destructive power would change everything forever. Wells warned that eventually "any little body of malcontents could use it." As though in prophecy of the long shadow the 1914-18 war would cast on the 20th century, Wells coined a now-familiar term for his imaginary superweapon that he believed could easily "wreck half a city."
He called it "the atomic bomb."
How a century-old war affects you
By Ruth Ben-Ghiat
CNN
Sun June 15, 2014
Editor's note: This is the first in a series on the legacies of World War I. It will appear on CNN.com/OPINION in the weeks leading up to the 100-year anniversary of the war's outbreak in August. Ruth Ben-Ghiat, guest editor for the series, is a professor of history and Italian studies at New York University. A specialist in 20th century European and Italian history, she writes and lectures on the world wars, dictatorships and empire. Her forthcoming book (January 2015) is "Italian Fascism's Empire Cinema." The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of the author.
(CNN) -- World War I began a hundred years ago this summer, but for many of us it might as well be a thousand. We know it, if we know it at all, as a dimly remembered chapter in high school history, or as scenes from old black-and-white movies of soldiers hunkered in trenches doing battle with Germans in pointy helmets. It was all too real for more than 65 million men from some 30 nations who were plunged into carnage the likes of which the world had never before seen.
Every one of those soldiers is dead, and the causes they fought for are lost on many of us. Yet this "war to end all wars" is not a remote event. In fact, World War I changed the world forever, and its effects are all around us.
To begin with, it rewrote history at the grandest level: Empires fell, and new nations--Austria, Hungary, Yugoslavia and Poland among them-- were born in the ashes. Leaders of the still-powerful French and British empires used the conflict to redraw borders in ways that set the stage for future conflicts that stretch on today, in the Middle East, for example.
WAR'S LASTING LEGACY
The first World War began August 4, 1914, in the wake of the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria-Hungary on June 28 of that year. In the next two months, CNN.com/Opinion will feature articles on the weapons of war, its language, the role of women, battlefield injuries and the rise of aerial surveillance.
But there is much more. The first mass conflict among industrialized nations, World War I upended the way war was fought. The weapons it introduced -- submarines, machine guns, poison gas, grenades, tanks -- are all still part of our arsenals. And it was World War I that made airpower and strategic bombing central to the success of any future war. Trench warfare traumatized both soldiers and landscapes, and informed art and literature for years. It would reappear as a battlefield strategy in both the Korean War and in the Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s.
At home and on the battlefield, World War I put new objects and words into circulation: "cooties" are something no kid wants to get, but for GIs in the trenches, they were real and they were lice; and sanitary napkins developed from the handy alternative use nurses found for cellulose bandage material produced for the war. The war popularized Kleenex and tea bags and zippers.
In fact, every time you admire an aircraft carrier, eat a meatless sausage, sit under a sun lamp, wear a Burberry trench coat, or set your clock ahead for daylight saving time, you are reaching back to commune with World War I.
The dawn of chemical weapons
World War I's new weapons caused previously unseen and horrific kinds of injuries, and scientists raced to develop protections against them -- or to make even more lethal versions to use against the enemy. Poison gas was first used on a mass scale by the Germans in April 1915 during the second battle of Ypres, and cloths strapped over the mouth and nose were at first the only protection.
Gas masks evolved quickly, though, and by the end of the war even some horses and dogs at the front had their own. The horrors of gas attacks resonate today in the reports of chemical weapons use in Syria, and, earlier, in Saddam Hussein's Iraq, and the world still struggles to contain them.
All told, more than 9 million died in the conflict, and 21 million were wounded, psychologically scarring a generation. Soldiers were at pains to explain this new human experience of battle to those back home.
The English poet Siegfried Sassoon had this to say in 1917 about his time at the front: "I'm back from hell/With loathsome thoughts to sell/Secrets of death to tell;/ And horrors from the abyss." Many others had no more words: these victims of "war exhaustion," (the label of shell shock became more common) had trouble speaking: they are the forefathers of veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder today.
"Every time you admire an aircraft carrier, eat a meatless sausage, sit under a sun lamp, wear a Burberry trench coat, or set your clock ahead for daylight saving time, you are reaching back to commune with World War I."
Likewise the scale and type of physical injuries challenged the ingenuity of prosthesis designers, whose work to replace lost body parts would enable countless soldiers to return to productive civilian life, a process echoed today as soldiers from recent wars recover from the toll of roadside bombs.
World War I also set the stage for future conflicts, by breaking down barriers between military and civilian life. While soldiers fought at the battlefront, civilian women and men built their weapons, distributed food and propaganda, and kept the home front running. Women gained new visibility in society, moving into the jobs vacated by enlisted men.
They drove streetcars, smelted iron, built bombs and then, after a long day at the factory, scrounged for food for their families. Civilians working for the war effort meant that anyone could be a target: German Fokker planes attacked at the front, but Zeppelin airships bombed London and Paris. "Total war" made the home front a dangerous place.
This war left few things unchanged in its path, even in lands that saw no fighting. Although it was mainly fought in Europe, it awakened many to the scope and diversity of the planet. "The entire world is participating in the war!" a French almanac exclaimed in 1917, showing its readers a map of the world divided into enemy, ally, and neutral peoples. Whether as laborers or soldiers, Europeans went to other countries, and millions of Americans, Africans and Asians came to Europe.
'Trapped in a net of woe'
More than two million United States soldiers fought in Europe, and the British and French empires brought over their colonial subjects. "We perish in the desert; you wash yourself and lie in bed," wrote an Indian soldier to his wife in September 1915. "We are trapped in a net of woe; while you go free. Our life is a living death."
How did Europe arrive at this state of catastrophe? The assassination of Austrian-Hungarian Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife, Sophie, on June 28, 1914 by the Bosnian Serb Gavrilo Princip caused an international crisis that led in just over a month to multiple mobilizations.
The Archduke, traveling in an open car, was in Sarajevo to inspect imperial armed forces in Bosnia and Herzegovina, which were among the former Ottoman territories annexed by Austria-Hungary in 1908, angering Serbian nationalists such as Princip.
"The scale and type of physical injuries challenged the ingenuity of prosthesis designers, whose work to replace lost body parts would enable countless soldiers to return to productive civilian life."
After the assassination, Austria-Hungary gave Serbia an ultimatum, causing Russia to intervene to protect its Serbian client state, and Germany to help its Austrian ally. And so it all began: the military obligations imposed by the system of alliances drew one power after another into combat.
All parties thought the war would be a short one; none imagined the speed with which the conflict would degenerate into a series of local atrocities (the Belgians became the conflict's first group of refugees, as they fled German rape and plunder) and mass slaughter across many fronts.
The habituation to violence and the acceptance of these lethal new inventions is one of World War I's most unfortunate legacies. Chemical weapons provides a case in point. Their effectiveness, as proved by the precedent of World War I, has given them a permanent place in many state arsenals, despite the paper trail of international agreements meant to ban their use. Democracies and dictatorships (France and Italy) both used them in the interwar period as agents of colonial conquest and rule, and Syria is the most recent example of their use.
As we approach this 100-year anniversary, each combatant country is remembering the war in its own way. In America, the echo has been fainter, due as much to the country's late entry into the war (April 1917) as to the prominence of World War II.
"The First World War is not well understood or remembered in the United States, U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates said at a 2008 Veterans Day ceremony at which the last living American combatant, Frank Buckles, who died in 2011, was present. "Yet few events have so markedly shaped the world we live in."
At war's end in 1918, America emerged from its 18 months of combat with a raft of new legislation that is still in force -- such as the Selective Service Act, which still today allows the President to draft soldiers, and the Espionage Act, used recently to charge Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden -- and with a new status as an international power.
A century of debates over how and whether America should intervene in global crises would lie ahead.