I am a specialist in 18th-19th Cy European history, but I once spent a summer doing research on the First World War. Here in honor of #WWI100 are some of the horrible things I learned:
First, some numbers: in #WWI an average of 900 French and 1300 German soldiers died EVERY DAY. At the end, 20,000,000 (twenty million) soldiers were disabled. 2/n
Western Front was 475 miles long, but it is estimated that 25,000 miles of trenches snaked along it. #WWI was a boon to the barbed-wire industry. Before 1914, British Army annually used 2500 shovels. During it? 2,500,000
3x British soldiers were killed in the first days of the Battle of the Somme as during all fifteen years of the Napoleonic Wars; the Battle of Verdun shortened one hill by sixty feet
We use the same vocab for #WWI & earlier wars, but what does "battle" mean when the Battle of the Somme lasted for 5 months and that of Verdun for 10? territory on which the first was fought, 10x "battlefield" of Waterloo
US troops entered #WWI comparatively late, but US industry was there from the beginning. US Steel Co. sold 2.8 million miles of barbed wire (prior to war, main export market: Argentina, for enclosing the pampas)
7/n : “Ask the veteran… what he fears most and hear him say: "Wire"… Not chlorine gas or high-explosive shells. No lobbed grenades, or charges of T.N.T. thrown from silent guns, but just barbed wire—the accursed web, unseen and cruel.” W.C. Fitz-Gerald, The War Budget (1915)
8/n 19-year old 2nd Lt William Ratcliffe wrote to his parents (1916) "What is there here to raise a man’s mind out of the rut? Everywhere one sees preparations for murder; nearly every person one sees is a filthy, dirty man with some instrument of destruction about his person."
9/n Ratcliffe had thought war would have a good effect on young men, "making them more religious." From the Front, he wrote,"Everywhere the work of God is spoiled by the hand of man." Ratcliffe wrote this in June 1916; was killed the next month at age 19.
10/n #WWI mobilized the homefront as well of course. In the USA, 6000+ arrests under 1917-1918 Espionage and Sedition Acts, which made it a crime to speak or write any statements that were “disloyal” to the government (even in private correspondence).
11/n Civilians were mobilized for war work, parades, "voluntary" donations, and as buyers of war bonds. 
12/n But silver was not literally melted down for bullets (too soft). Instead it went to pay for munitions; rubber company profits in #WW1> 4fold; oil companies' 10x
13/n the Russian Revolution, the November Revolution in Berlin, and mutinies of ordinary soldiers (in HALF the French divisions along the Western Front in spring 1917, they refused to advance, baa'd at commanders like sheep)...even #Armistice did not end Europe's misery.
Wnen #WW1 ended, civil wars broke out in Germany, Russia; demobilized soldiers almost immediately formed paramilitary societies. Govts had paid for the war by borrowing, the great problem of the 1920s was "How to pay for the war?"
The thread about hyperinflation in the aftermath of #WW1 is a story for another time. But NOTE; when the Nazis came to power in the 1930s, it was not in response to Weimar inflation but to the Depression (i.e., DEFLATION).
16/18 Nearly HALF soldiers killed in #WW1 have no known grave. Some blown to bits, others piled into mass graves. Left where they died, their eyes & livers were quickly eaten by rats. In 1922, a French hospital circulated photo of veteran w amnesia. 200+ families claimed him.
17/18 In the Douaumont Ossuary, the bones of 130,000+ unidentified soldiers (chiefly French and German) lie jumbled together atlasobscura.com/places/douaumo…
18/18 Others can tweet better than I about how #WW1 affected the colonized peoples of Africa and Asia; about the Italian and Eastern fronts. Make no mistake: it was a WORLD war and almost no one before summer 1914 saw it coming.
