Throughout the world, the conflict that raged from 1914 to 1918 was called the Great War as it was being fought, great both in extent and in the self-proclaimed righteousness of the causes held by the Central Powers and the Allies, mighty blocs each of which argued that it was saving civilization from the other.
We now call it World War I, and at its end more than eight and a half million soldiers on three continents lay dead.
We might also think of it as the War of the Cousins. The royal families of Britain, Russia, and Germany were related by marriage and blood, ruled by men who had known one another since childhood. These three great nations, as well as smaller powers such as France, Austria-Hungary, Italy, and Japan, had long arrayed themselves in a series of loose alliances. The rulers of the Ottoman Empire, for instance, though often at war with Austria-Hungary, took the side of their longtime enemy against Russia, which had expansionist designs on the neighboring Caucasus region. France and Britain had been bitter enemies throughout the nineteenth century, but now, in the twentieth, found common cause in thwarting the Germany of Kaiser Wilhelm, who wanted to have an overseas empire to call his own but so far had managed to conquer only a few small parts of Africa and some islands in the southwestern Pacific Ocean.
German soldiers on the Western Front.
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