1918 — The Last Gamble

In early 1918 the war reached a strange moment of imbalance. Russia was out. The Eastern Front, which had consumed German divisions for years, had vanished. German leaders believed they finally had what they had been missing since 1914: a temporary window—just a few months—when they could concentrate force in the west before the United States could fully arrive. It was not optimism. It was calculation. A final throw of the dice.

The treaty that sealed Russia’s exit, Brest-Litovsk, had freed German troops, but it had not freed Germany from hunger. The British blockade still strangled supplies. Coal was short. Food was rationed brutally. Civilians were malnourished. Soldiers at the front were exhausted. The leadership knew that time itself was now a weapon pointed at Germany. American manpower and industry were mobilizing. If the war lasted into 1919, Germany’s odds shrank dramatically. So 1918 became a race against an opponent that wasn’t yet fully on the field.

1917 — Mutiny, Submarines, and the Breaking Point

By 1917, the war had entered a phase no one had planned for and no one could control. The optimism of 1914 was long dead, and even the grim determination of 1916 had begun to rot from within. The armies still faced each other across the Western Front, but beneath the surface, the foundations of the war effort were cracking. This was no longer only a struggle of armies. It was a struggle of societies—of food, morale, discipline, belief, and patience.

On the Western Front, the trenches remained largely where they had been for years. From the North Sea to Switzerland, the front lines shifted only in meters and hundreds of meters, never in decisive miles. Soldiers rotated in and out of the front line, but the pattern of life barely changed: weeks in mud-filled trenches, under constant artillery fire, punctuated by raids, patrols, and the occasional large offensive that promised much and delivered mass casualties instead.

In France, the year began with hope—and ended in disillusionment. General Robert Nivelle, newly promoted after Verdun, promised a breakthrough that would end the war within forty-eight hours. His plan relied on overwhelming artillery, precise coordination, and rapid infantry advance. In April 1917, the French army launched the Nivelle Offensive along the Aisne River.

It was a disaster.

By 1917 the war no longer pretended to be about glory. Whatever illusions survived 1914 had been buried in mud, wire, and arithmetic. This was now a war of exhaustion, and everyone involved knew it, even if they could not yet say it aloud. The question was no longer who would win quickly, but who could endure longer—economically, politically, psychologically.

On the Western Front the lines still ran like scars across France and Belgium. Millions of men had rotated through the trenches, but the geography barely moved. The great battles of the previous year—Verdun and the Somme—had proved something terrifyingly clear: industrial war could consume human lives at a rate no society had ever prepared for. Verdun alone had cost roughly 700,000 casualties. The Somme more than a million. And yet neither had delivered decisive victory. Instead, they taught generals and governments the same brutal lesson: modern defenses favored the defender, and breaking them required either overwhelming material superiority or time measured in years.

Hello and welcome to War — 1870 to 1949: How Empires Rise and Fall. Season Two: World War One — The Age of Attrition. Episode Three: 1916 — Verdun, The Somme, and the Arithmetic of Endurance.

By 1916, the war has stopped pretending. The speeches can still use the old words—honor, duty, glory—but the battlefield is now speaking a newer language, colder and more precise. It speaks in tonnage, in supply lines, in shell production, in rail schedules, in replacement drafts, in body counts. It speaks in the logic of systems. And the most frightening thing about that logic is that it doesn’t require hatred to function. It only requires momentum.

If 1915 taught Europe that modern war could become a trench-bound stalemate, 1916 proved something worse: that the stalemate could be exploited, engineered, and extended on purpose. This is the year of Verdun and the Somme, two names that aren’t merely battles so much as mechanisms—vast machines built to test how long a society can bleed without collapsing.

Hello and welcome to War — 1870 to 1949: How Empires Rise and Fall. Season Two: World War One — The Age of Attrition. Episode Two: 1915 — Trenches, Stalemate, and the Invention of Modern Suffering.

By the start of 1915 the great illusion of 1914 had already collapsed, but it hadn’t been replaced by clarity. What replaced it was something worse: a kind of stubborn fog. Leaders, generals, newspapers, and ordinary people all felt—without quite saying it out loud—that the war was going to be longer and darker than promised. But nobody yet had a new story strong enough to hold what was happening. And when humans don’t have a story that fits reality, they keep using the old one. They keep using words like “breakthrough” and “decisive battle,” even as the ground itself is telling them a different truth.

That truth was etched into the earth along the Western Front: trenches. Not heroic trenches. Not romantic trenches. Trenches as engineering, trenches as imprisonment, trenches as habitat. The trench system in France and Belgium became a vast, living scar—hundreds of miles of ditches, dugouts, parapets, sandbags, wire, and mud. It wasn’t one trench, it was layers: a front line, support trenches, reserve trenches, all connected by narrow communication trenches that twisted like arteries. Behind them sat batteries of artillery and supply roads. In front of them sat barbed wire and the open killing ground of no man’s land. The entire landscape became a machine designed to absorb human bodies and convert them into casualties.

In the summer of 1914, Europe did not feel like a continent about to commit suicide. It felt like a machine that had been running smoothly for decades, loud but familiar, proud of its engineering, proud of its empires, proud of its armies, and confident that history belonged to it. The cities were electric with modern life: trains, telegraphs, newspapers, factories, parliaments, stock exchanges, cafés. The educated classes argued about art and science and nationalism as if those things were distinct categories. The working classes lived closer to the ground, closer to hunger and fatigue, but even there the mood was not apocalyptic. It was tense, yes. There were strikes. There were anarchists. There were assassinations. There were diplomatic crises that flared and faded. But a crisis was almost comforting. A crisis meant the old system was still the system.

1914: Ultimatum and Mobilization

Hello and welcome back. This is WAR 1870–1949: How Empires Rise and Fall. We’ve moved into the Balkans, into the seam where old empires crack and new nations sharpen themselves like blades. And now we come to something that feels, at first, almost reassuring: the crises before 1914, the near misses, the moments when Europe comes close to the abyss and then steps back.

But here is the cruel truth. Near misses don’t always teach caution. Sometimes they teach confidence. Sometimes they teach that escalation works. Sometimes they teach that you can mobilize and threaten and posture and still avoid the worst. And that lesson—learned repeatedly—can be fatal.

So today we’re talking about the rehearsals.

1905 to 1913.

A decade where Europe practices catastrophe without yet committing to it. A decade where every crisis tightens the system a little more, hardens assumptions a little more, narrows the range of acceptable choices a little more. A decade where fear becomes routine and routine becomes policy.

Let’s begin with the basic rhythm of these rehearsals.

A crisis erupts—often on the edges of empire, often in a place where prestige and alliance obligations intersect.

Diplomats scramble.

Hello and welcome back. This is WAR 1870–1949: How Empires Rise and Fall. Last time we built the alliance machine—how fear becomes commitment, how commitment becomes credibility, and how credibility becomes a trap. Today we move to the place where that machine is most likely to seize and throw sparks.

The Balkans.

I want you to picture the Balkans not as a simple region on a map, but as a fault line. A seam in the world. A place where empires overlap, where identities tangle, where languages and religions and memories live on top of each other like layers of sediment. The Balkans are where the old imperial order—especially the Ottoman Empire and the Austro-Hungarian Empire—begins to crack under the pressure of modern nationalism. And when old orders crack, the scramble to inherit their territory becomes both political and deeply emotional.

War 1870 - 1949 How Empires Rise and Fall Alliances: Promises That Become Traps

Hello and welcome back. This is WAR 1870–1949: How Empires Rise and Fall. We’ve walked through nationalism as faith, empire as prestige addiction, and the naval race as fear made visible. And now we come to the architecture that ties all of it together—the thing that turns anxiety into obligation, and obligation into catastrophe.

Alliances.

At first glance, alliances look like common sense. If you are a state that fears a stronger neighbor, you find friends. If you are a state that fears isolation, you bind yourself to another power so your rival has to think twice. Alliances are sold as deterrence. They’re sold as stability. They’re sold as the rational answer to insecurity.

And in the short term, they often are.

Empires Overseas, Rivalries at Home (colonies, prestige, and the pressure valve that fails)

Hello and welcome back. This is WAR 1870–1949: How Empires Rise and Fall. Last time we talked about the new religion—nationalism—and how modern states learn to shape identity through schools, flags, rituals, and mass politics. That was the inner engine, the part that lives inside the chest.

Today we’re going to talk about the outer engine. The world beyond Europe. The maps painted in colors. The flags planted in distant soil. The idea that a nation’s greatness can be measured by what it controls far away.

Empires overseas, rivalries at home.

Because one of the strangest truths about this era is that Europe tries to keep peace on the continent while it competes brutally outside it. It’s like a family that insists everything is fine at the dinner table while it’s constantly fighting in the backyard. But fighting trains the body. It trains reflexes. It trains pride. It trains suspicion. And eventually you bring that reflex back inside.

Empire is often described with economic language—resources, markets, trade routes, strategic ports. And those things matter. But empire is also psychological. Empire is prestige. Empire is reassurance. Empire is proof that you are not declining. Empire is a way to tell your public a story: we are strong, we are destined, we are not being left behind by history.

That last phrase—left behind—is key.