On 4 February 2012, Florence Green died. Born in Edmonton, London in 1901, she was 110 years old. Having been a member of the Women’s Royal Air Force, she was also the last veteran of the First World War. The ‘Great War’, as it was originally called, had truly passed from living memory into history.

It all started in southeastern Europe, in the corner of the Balkans, an area known for its volatile tendencies but isolated enough for it not to concern the average person on the streets of London, Paris or Brussels, let alone the citizens of Sydney, Wellington or Madras. Yet within just over a month of the assassination of the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, as the efforts of negotiation and diplomatic bluffs failed, war had erupted, spreading across Europe then across the globe. But no matter, it would be a short war – finished before the fall of the autumn leaves or over by Christmas. Motivated by patriotism and nationalism, and peppered, in varying degrees, by ambition, prestige, fear, revenge, obligation or simply survival, nations went to war.

In 1914, the war of people’s imagination lay in the previous century – colourful uniforms, military bands playing, flags flying and men on horseback, and short, sharp conflicts. But 1914 proved to be different, a watershed, as old notions of war were trampled in the mud. No one could have perceived such a war of unimaginable horror, fought on such an unprecedented scale; a war fought with terrifying new weapons, of death on an industrial magnitude, a war that involved so many nations and reached into the very fabric of society; a war that brought to an end the Belle Époque of Edwardian life. The events of 1914, and the war that followed, changed the world and shaped the twentieth century.

This, in an hour, is 1914.

Turn of the Century: States of the Nations

Europe in the early twentieth century was a continent of superpowers and would-be superpowers. Motivated by ambitions of self-aggrandizement and self-preservation, they eyed each other with suspicion, envy and often fear bordering on the paranoia.

Germany

Germany was the cause of much of this fear. A unified country only since 1871, Germany, under the careful management of its chancellor, Otto von Bismarck, had rapidly built itself up into a modern, militaristic, industrial powerhouse. It looked to the colonial assets of its neighbours, especially the vast, sprawling empire of Great Britain, and set on a course of obtaining its own empire, colonies, its own ‘place in the sun’. And for that, it needed a navy that could rival Britain’s, whose naval supremacy had ruled the waves since the days of Nelson a century before. The German Kaiser, Wilhelm II, had, as a boy, admired the ‘proud British ships’, and wished as an adult to ‘possess a navy as fine as the English’.

Kaiser Wilhelm II, 1905

Germany realized that Russia was becoming stronger, building its military and industrial capacity and extending its network of railways – a vital factor in moving huge armies across large distances. If there was to be war, the longer it was delayed, the greater the strength of Russia: ‘Every year we wait, lessens our chances,’ said the German chief-of-staff, Helmuth von Moltke (the Younger).

Great Britain

Great Britain, on her part, wanted nothing more than to protect her empire – which, as every British schoolchild was taught, covered a quarter of the globe’s landmass – and the associated opportunities for commerce the empire provided. For much of the latter half of the nineteenth century, Britain had remained aloof from international affairs, concentrating only on matters of self-interest and its empire consisting of 400 million people – a situation it called its ‘splendid isolation’. The emergence of Germany as a perceived new threat, to both Britain’s colonial holdings and to the nation itself, changed that.

Knowing the importance of its navy not simply for the empire but for home security as well, and increasingly fearful of Germany’s expansive desires, Britain was determined to maintain its dominance. In 1906, Britain launched the first of a much-feared new class of battleship, HMS Dreadnought, which was far superior to anything that had previously sailed. As well as this, Britain implemented legislation to ensure continual commitment to naval expansion, despite the enormous cost involved, thus engaging in an arms race with Germany. (By 1914, Britain’s fleet of battleships numbered forty-nine, outstripping Germany’s fleet of twenty-nine.)

Britain’s fears of German intent were also fuelled by the widening of the Kiel Canal. The sixty-mile canal, originally opened in 1895, cut through the base of the Jutland peninsula, linking the Baltic Sea on the east and the North Sea on the west. Its widening, and deepening, completed in early 1914, allowed the passage of German warships, giving them easy access into the North Sea, a prospect viewed with dismay in Britain.

Britain’s sense of military superiority had been temporarily dented following the Second Boer War of 1899 to 1902. Technically, Britain had walked away the victors, but that it took three years and some unethical, ungentlemanly tactics to defeat a perceived ragamuffin collection of white South Africans of Dutch origin had shaken the British military and political establishment to the core. But calls in Britain to introduce military conscription in order to be better prepared in the event of a future war, and not suffer another humiliation as experienced in South Africa, were continually dismissed by Herbert Asquith, Liberal prime minister from 1908.

Austro-Hungarian emperor, Franz Joseph, c. 1915

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1914: History in an Hour

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