The First Great War

For Britain the opening shots were at Mons on 23rd August 1914 when units of the British Expeditionary Force defended the Mons-Conde Canal. The battle was in many ways a British victory, but the French army withdraw on their flank, leaving them exposed. The so-called Retreat From Mons began which took them over 200 miles to the Marne to take part in the largest single battle of 1914, the Battle of the Marne, when the Schlieffen Plan was finally halted, almost at the gates of Paris.

Having failed to take Paris, the Germans then moved north to Flanders in the so-called Race to the Sea. The route to the coast took them towards the old medieval city of Ypres, and it was here that the First Battle of Ypres began in October 1914.

The German advance was again stopped, and both sides dug in. The mobile war was over.

On both fronts they dug in, and on the Western Front a whole series of trenches were dug stretching over 450 miles from the Channel coast to the border of Switzerland. The key to understanding the First World War is to see it as a huge siege – with both sides locked into that siege over the course of the next four years, with the front hardly moving.

This was the war no-one had planned for: a strange, dark, troglodyte war in which men lived in deep dugouts, fought in trenches, walked through tunnels, and were surrounded by high explosive and gas.

Both sides spent much of the next four years trying to develop ways of fighting and winning this war, eventually leading to the final battles of the conflict when the war once again became mobile.

The British going on the offensive first at Neuve-Chapelle in March 1915, the Germans introducing poison gas at Second Ypres in April 1915, leading to the next phase in 1916 of industrial scale warfare with battles like Verdun and the Somme. The war moved from regular soldiers fighting in the trenches, to territorials to volunteers and by 1916 there were conscripts.

Commanders came and went, and for Britain General Sir Douglas Haig commanded troops on the Western Front from late 1915 until the end of the war.

Under his command the British Army adapted and changed, and while post-war he was often blamed for the huge casualties his leadership enabled the army to become a modern fighting force and fight battles that would result in victory in 1918.

For most British soldiers the defining battles of the war, which still dominate public consciousness, were the Somme in 1916 and Passchendaele in 1917. The latter in particular was renowned for its terrible conditions of mud and lunar-landscapes of shell holes.

First used on the Somme in September 1916, at Cambrai the following year more than 400 British tanks smashed the German defences on the Hindenburg Line, showing what tanks were capable of. In the battles of 1918, tanks paved the way to victory on the battlefield, and in that year tanks fought tanks for the first time. This technical legacy of WW1 would go on to become even more significant a generation later in WW2.

In the beginning tanks were designed for front-line combat and to overcome the deadlock of trench warfare, with heavy firepower, strong armour, and tracks providing good maneuverability, they were feared on the battlefield.

Tank squadrons on the Western Front

When they did, it would tip the balance in the favour of the Allies and Germany would lose. Ending the war against the Russians in February 1918 released more than a million German soldiers to come to the Western Front.

The first attack was on the Somme on 21st March 1918 when the Germans broke through until stopped at Villers-Bretonneux. In Flanders in April 1918, during what the British called The Battle of the Lys, the Germans attacked again, and then on the Aisne in May and in the Marne in June-July 1918. By this time the German Army was not only running out of steam, but men: a very high percentage of those million who had come from Russia were now dead, wounded or prisoners of war.

With the arrival of American troops by the summer of 1918 the Allies went on the offensive again and at Amiens on 8th August 1918 the German positions were broken and it was the beginning of the last one hundred days of the First World War. British forces pushed the Germans back in Northern France and Flanders, and Americans and French did the same in the Meuse-Argonne offensive and in the Champagne.

The final battles of this decisive period of the war were successful but costly; the Canadians alone, for example, were losing tens of thousands of men each month during this period.

This came into effect with an Armistice at 11am on 11th November 1918, but the fighting continued right up until the last moment. For the British their war ended at Mons, where it had started in 1914, and here the last British soldier fell about an hour and a half before the Armistice: George Edwin Ellison of the 5th Lancers.

Ellison was a pre-war regular soldier who had been at the front since 1914. But he wasn’t the last of all: the final British and Commonwealth casualty was a Canadian: George Lawrence Price, who died in the streets of Mons just two minutes before the end of the war.

The final Allied soldier to die was an American, who fell near Verdun at 10.59am, just seconds before the end: Henry Gunther was in a rifle section advancing through the fog when they walked straight into machine-gun fire. Their deaths brought the war on the Western Front to an end.

The monetary cost of the war was so huge it took nearly a century to pay off the debt. But the human cost was also enormous: more than a million had died from Britain and the Commonwealth, and millions of others wounded, sick and taken prisoner. While four in every five soldiers survived the war, their lives would be changed forever as the experience of this unique war would haunt them all their remaining years.

As one veteran said “no man was the same after the Somme” and while by the 1980s only a handful of veterans remain, and were largely forgotten, the death of the Last Fighting Tommy, Harry Patch, in 2009 rekindled interest in the war and the centenary period has seen record levels of people visiting the old battlefields and researching the lives of those who fought and died in the First World War.