The First World War (1914 to 18) was the first truly global conflict and the first to be fully mechanised. Armies clashed across continents on land, in the air, and at sea. Civilians were caught up in the destruction as never before. In this article, we tell the story of WWI through the words of those who were there.

Despite Germany's hopes that its prepared Schlieffen Plan would win a swift victory over France and its allies, the First World War settled down on the Western Front to a static one of trench warfare. Other fronts developed in Eastern Europe, Africa, the Middle East, and Asia. Hundreds of thousands of soldiers poured into these fronts from all sides involved in the conflict, many amongst them keen for action and eager to do their patriotic duty. The public was equally enthusiastic in the early days of the war. One French infantry officer recalls the scene as his train carrying troops to the front set off from Paris:

…without any signal, the train slowly steamed out of the station. At that moment, quite spontaneously, like a smouldering fire suddenly erupting into roaring flames, an immense clamour arose as the Marseillaise burst from a thousand throats. All the men were standing at the train's windows, waving their képis. From the track, quais and the neighbouring trains, the crowds waved back…Crowds waved back at every station, behind every barrier, and at every window along the road. Cries of 'Vive la France! Vive l'armée' could be heard everywhere, while people waved handkerchiefs and hats. The women were throwing kissed and heaped flowers on our convoy. The young men were shouting: "Au revoir! A bientôt" .

(Keegan, 72)

A similar zeal for battle was seen across the world and, undeniably, there quickly built up a pressure from peers and society to 'join up and do one's bit', as here recalled by one New Zealand soldier:

University classes emptied…sports fixtures were abandoned. To be left behind was unthinkable. If your mate was going, then somehow you had to get away too.

(Keegan, 242)

Canadian soldier Victor Wheeler recalls the impact on local French farmers as war descended on them by chance in October 1914:

With pick and shovel we dug trenches through beautiful fields of grain, fully realising what damage we were doing to the farmers' hopes of reaping small harvests that would enable them to stem hunger during the coming winter. The patriarch with his ox-drawn plough, the matronly gleaner, and the young woman gathering grass and leaves, stood arms akimbo, wordlessly, helplessly, hopelessly watching. The depressing effect on the morale of the men – to many of whom raising grain on the Western prairie also meant their livelihood – could not be easily dismissed.

(Yorke, 28)

The reality of trench warfare soon set in. Ernst Jünger, a German soldier, gives the following description of the trench he lived and fought in:

To rest in, there are dugouts, which have evolved by now from rudimentary holes in the ground to proper enclosed living quarters, with beamed ceilings and plank-cladded walls. The dugouts are about six feet high, and at a depth where there floors are roughly level with the bottom of the trench outside. In effect, there is a layer of earth on top of them thick enough to enable them to survive oblique hits. In heavy fire, though, they are death-traps…The whole thing should be pictured as a huge, ostensibly inert installation, a secret hive of industry and watchfulness, where, within a few seconds of an alarm being sounded, every man is at his post. But one shouldn't have too romantic an idea of the atmosphere, there is a certain prevailing torpor that proximity to the earth seems to engender.

(Jünger, 40 to 41)

Machine guns and artillery shells caused total carnage amongst infantry troops unimaginatively deployed again and again by their generals to cross the no man's land between rival trench systems. A German soldier, F. L. Cassell, recalls:

…the shout of the sentry, 'They are coming'…Helmet, belt and rifle and up the steps…in the trench a headless body. The sentry had lost his life to a last shell…there they come, the khaki-yellows, they are not twenty metres in front of our trench…They advance slowly fully equipped…machine-gun fire tears holes in their ranks.

(Keegan, 295)

In those trenches between Allied and Turkish troops on the Gallipoli Peninsula, a similar story is recorded by British soldier Vere Hamsworth in a letter home:

We spent four days in the front-line trench. We had only a few casualties. We were put there just after a big attack which had partially failed and the ground between our trench and the Turks were strewn with bodies. It strikes me that they will be there for a long time. In this the body and face turn quite black in less than 24 hours and the smell is terrific. The flies – which are everywhere – also add to the general discomfort.

(Williams, 37)

New weapons used in the trenches, like poison gas shells, caused bewilderment, dismay, and terrible deaths, as here recalled by British soldier Walter Clarke:

You didn't know, they were only just shells. But what happened, these shells when they burst they'd drop all on the floor, liquid. And in the morning the mist, there's always a mist there every morning, that was coming into the air and you were breathing it all in. Nobody knew until one or two chaps started being sick and a lot of the fellows were laying about going blind and sores all over their eyes. And then they realised what it was.

(Imperial War Museums)

The seriously wounded were taken to military hospitals behind the lines, often staffed by volunteer nurses. Britisher Daisy Spickett was one such nurse, and here she explains why she joined the medical services:

I always had in mind that I wanted to nurse and as soon as I heard of any talk of forming Red Cross Hospitals I began to make enquiries. I heard also that there was a likelihood of the War Office wanting volunteers for military hospitals, and that was what I decided I wanted. It seemed to me the only hope of getting right into the middle of everything, getting abroad and doing whatever was going, and the idea of the Army attracted me – being in the Army. But it seemed to me the thing I wanted more than anything else and that was how I put my name down for military hospitals and got my posting in July 1915.

(IWM)

Even amongst the horrors of the trenches, there were brief respites, the most remarkable being the Christmas truce of 1914, when several separate groups of soldiers along the Western Front met and exchanged gifts with the enemy. Elsewhere, messages of goodwill were simply shouted across no man's land, as here recorded by Lieutenant Edward Hulse:

…there were wafted towards us from the trenches opposite the sounds of singing and merry-making, and occasionally the guttural tones of a German were to be heard shouting out lustily, 'A happy Christmas to you Englishmen!'

(Lawson-Jones, 91)

Trench life, endured for over four years for the lucky ones, came to be seen as an unchanging past, present, and future. Daily life in the trenches was recorded with a sort of disdainful nostalgia in popular songs such as this one written by the Australian soldier and poet Tom Skeyhill:

I've a little wet home in the tench;
Which the rain-storms continually drench;
Blue sky overhead,
Mud and clay for a bed,
And a stone that we use for a bench.

Bully beef and hard biscuits we chew;
Shells crackle and scare,
But no place can compare
With my little wet home in the trench.

(Yorke, 46)

WWI, of course, involved battles at sea and in the air. Alfred Fright, then still a teenager, recalls the greatest time of stress was waiting for any action to happen, as it inevitably would, sooner or later:

Whilst you was waiting for it you was absolutely dead scared, dead scared. But once it started it was fine and you seemed to lose it all. But up until that point, as I say, you was dead scared. And I know I've stood on the bridge sometimes and cried with being scared. And also I've stood on the bridge – cos we used to have to do lookouts, you see, that was our job mostly, boys. Course the ship sways that much you go three times that much up at the top mast head you see. And I've stood up there with these glasses to my eyes, froze to death and crying. That's the sort of life it was in them days.

(IWM)

British officer S. Pawley remembers a battle when he served on board HMS Glasgow:

We formed into battle line ahead with the Otranto on our port side at some distance and steamed north. It was not very long before smoke appeared on the horizon and we soon discovered this smoke came from two German heavy cruisers. And we were able to recognise Scharnhorst and Gneisenau. We were not long in closing on the enemy and soon the battle commenced. The Good Hope opened fire, a ranging shot, which fell short and then the battle became general. I was standing on the upper deck at the time; the sea was very rough under a leaden sky. At times the waves came clean overboard, came clean in over. We were hit in several places. One of our mess decks was flooded; the captain's cabin was wrecked; the signalman's arm was blown off in the foretop; holes were knocked in the coal bunkers and we were in a generally poor condition.

(IWM)

Aircraft became an important means of observation on the enemy and were used as bombers of strategic targets like supply dumps, bridges, and railway lines. Life in the air was glamorous but precarious, as here recalled by Royal Air Corps pilot Frederick Powell:

Well I think, not only 40 Squadron, but every RFC Squadron, the centre of the squadron seemed to be in the bar. That may offend a lot of people in these days, but it is perfectly true. And when you think of these boys, with the tensions they lived through, through the day, and they came in, in the evening, and then asked about their best friend, 'Where's he? I miss old George'. 'Oh, he bought it this afternoon'. 'Oh, heavens'. Now the gloom would come into a mess; the morale would die and the reaction immediately was, 'Well, come on chaps, what're you going to have?' That was the sort of spirit that kept going. I still think that it played a magnificent part in keeping up the morale of our troops generally.

(IWM)

As millions of men on all sides left their homes to fight, women were encouraged to replace the lost workers, particularly in vital industries like arms manufacturing and agriculture. Working in factories could be dangerous work, as here explained by one visitor to a German ammunition factory:

The working conditions were like what they must have been under early capitalism. There was always 'something wrong'. Especially during the night shift. Never a night passed without one or more of the women collapsing at their machines from exhaustion, hunger, illness…On many days in winter there would be no heating…

(Strachan, 157)

Civilian workers could become casualties of unexpected events, such as this explosion in a British weapons factory, recalled by Ethel M. Bilbrough:

No news came that night, but next day we heard that it was the most awful explosion of its kind ever known, as a munitions factory in East London at Silverton had caught fire somehow (Ah! How?) and the fire spread until it reached all the explosives and then the whole place was hurled up into the air, and four streets were demolished, and the dead and the dying and the injured lay amongst the ruins, so that when a relief party arrived they hardly knew where to begin. Over 100 people were killed, and more than 400 injured and disabled.

(Williams, 53).

The Zeppelin bombing raids of WWI involved terrifying new machines that could attack anywhere in the dead of night. Civilians were now brought into the realm of war, no matter how distant the front lines were. David Kirkwood describes a Zeppelin attack on Edinburgh in April 1916:

Suddenly a terrifying explosion occurred. Windows rattled, the ground quivered, pictures swung. We all gasped. I ran to the window and saw Vesuvius in eruption. I opened the window. A great flash greeted me from the castle and then, above the roaring, I heard the most dreadful screeching and shouting.

(Williams, 41)

The First World War ended in 1918, but for many, the effects would last a lifetime. Injuries, shocking memories, personal losses, and the difficulties of reintegrating into civilian life haunted many. Shell shock, the physical and psychological effects of shell fire, was one such lingering effect of this new and terrible modern warfare, as explained by British soldier Bertram Steward:

The strain of continual bombardment – continual, not just one bomb and then a quarter of an hour and another one but continual bombardment all the time pounding and pounding away. Now I think that's what people didn't understand, they heard of people having shell shock but what happened was everybody had shell shock who went through that sort of thing. It manifested itself in different ways. One of my friends who went out there, when he came back after the war he was accustomed to shut himself up in his home or in his garden and he wouldn't come out at all and nobody could get him to. He finished up – he was a great athlete, a good boy at school – he finished up in a lunatic asylum and died only within a year or two of the finish of the war.

(IWM)

For those who survived, the act of remembrance each 11 November helped keep memories of the lost alive and recognise the great sacrifices made. Many poems were written for the fallen, but one of the most enduring is 'For the Fallen' by Laurence Binyon, who himself served as a medical orderly in France:

They went with songs to the battle, they were young,
Straight of limb, true of eyes, steady and aglow.
They were staunch to the end against odds uncounted;
They fell with their faces to the foe.

They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We will remember them.

They mingle not with their laughing comrades again;
They sit no more at familiar tables of home;
They have no lot in our labour of the day-time;
They sleep beyond England's foam.

(Walter, 235)