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Jay Murray Winter is the Charles J. Stille Professor of History at Yale University, where he focuses his research on World War I and its impact on the 20th century. His website appears here. |
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Reflecting on the causes of the First World War, Jay Winter concludes his six-part video series, The Great War and the Shaping of the 20th Century (1996), as follows:
The war solved no problems. Its effects, both immediate and indirect, were either negative or disastrous. Morally subversive, economically destructive, socially degrading, confused in its course, futile in its result, it is the outstanding
example in European history of meaningless conflict.
Summing up his conclusions more recently, he states:
1938 is a long way from now, but it’s still a puzzle. What was it for? Why? Why all this
bloodshed? Why the carnage? Why the violence? Why the cruelty? I can’t pretend to have an
answer, but I know it’s a question that we still have to resolve.
After 50 years of research and writing, this great historian cannot tell us why the First World War occurred.
Yet the reason for the war is staring us in the face. The bloodshed contained its own meaning. One does not have to look beyond what it was. Observing the daily carnage in France in 1916, P. H. Pearse—founder of the Irish revolutionary movement—told us everything we need to know (in Kamenka, 1976):
| The last sixteenth months have been the most glorious in the history of Europe. Heroism has come back to the earth. It is good for the world that such things should be done. The old heart of the earth needed to be warmed with the red wine of the battlefield. Such august homage was never before offered to God as this, the homage of millions of lives given gladly for love of country. |
The First World War occurred so that the earth could be “warmed with the red wine of the battlefield”. It was a form of “august homage”—millions of lives given “for love of country”.
The First World War was a gigantic demonstration of devotion—abject submission—to the nation-state. Societies from throughout the world offered up their young men upon the sacrificial block. They fed the hungry, humungous god, the nation which, like the god of the Aztecs, comes into being—continues to exist—to the extent that it feeds on the body and blood of sacrificial victims.
First World War Casualties
The figures below are from Chris Trueman's HistoryLearningSite.co.uk.
| Country |
Men mobilised |
Killed |
Wounded |
POW’s + missing |
Total casualties |
casualties in % of men mobilised |
| Russia |
12 mil |
1.7 mil |
4.9 mil |
2.5 mil |
9.15 mil |
76.3 |
| France |
8.4 mil |
1.3 mil |
4.2 mil |
537,000 |
6.1 mil |
73.3 |
| GB + Empire |
8.9 mil |
908,000 |
2 mil |
191,000 |
3.1 mil |
35.8 |
| Italy |
5.5 mil |
650,000 |
947,000 |
600,000 |
2.1 mil |
39 |
| USA |
4.3 mil |
126,000 |
234,000 |
4,500 |
350,000 |
8 |
| Japan |
800,000 |
300 |
900 |
3 |
1210 |
0.2 |
| Romania |
750,000 |
335,000 |
120,000 |
80,000 |
535,000 |
71 |
| Serbia |
700,000 |
45,000 |
133,000 |
153,000 |
331,000 |
47 |
| Belgium |
267,000 |
13,800 |
45,000 |
34,500 |
93,000 |
35 |
| Greece |
230,000 |
5000 |
21,000 |
1000 |
27,000 |
12 |
| Portugal |
100,000 |
7222 |
13,700 |
12,000 |
33,000 |
33 |
| Total Allies |
42 mil |
5 mil |
13 mil |
4 mil |
22 mil |
52% |
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| Germany |
11 mil |
1.7 mil |
4.2 mil |
1.1 mil |
7.1 mil |
65 |
| Austria |
7.8 mil |
1.2 mil |
3.6 mil |
2.2 mil |
7 mil |
90 |
| Turkey |
2.8 mil |
325,000 |
400,000 |
250,000 |
975,000 |
34 |
| Bulgaria |
1.2 mil |
87,000 |
152,000 |
27,000 |
266,000 |
22 |
| Total Central Powers |
22.8 mil |
3.3 mil |
8.3 mil |
3.6 mil |
15 mil |
67 |
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| Grand Total |
65 mil |
8.5 mil |
21 mil |
7.7 mil |
37 mil |
57% |
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