Five things you (probably) didn’t know about the First World War
Alex Churchill reveals some little-known facts about one of history’s deadliest conflicts
1. The Germans were well organised – but unpractised
The German army is often depicted as an epic, unstoppable machine. There’s no doubt that, at the outbreak of the First World War, it was the most formidably organised military force on the planet – but organisation is only one element of success.
Germany’s failure to end the war in the west quickly before turning east to deal with Russia wasn’t for want of organisation. But, though the Schlieffen Plan laboriously set out and dictated how all of this would happen, one thing that Germany couldn’t do was practise.
Germany did not win the war in 1914 because achieving perfection while transitioning from theory to operations is impossible. The reality of deploying massive armies threw up all kinds of issues: supply lines grew too long as the advance was so rapid, and forces suffered major breaks in communication. In addition, an army of this size inevitably comprised largely inexperienced, terrified men seeing combat for the first time.
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2. Belgians fought Germany virtually alone at the start of the conflict
We know so much about the experiences of British troops in the trenches, but all too often we forget about the French and Belgian armies who fought on their home soil.
In the opening weeks of the war, the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) in France and Belgium was still relatively tiny – only about 60,000 men. During this period, the much larger Belgian army fought virtually alone – without the help of its allies – desperately battling to halt the massive German forces invading their country.
Similarly, at the outbreak of war, hundreds of thousands of Frenchmen immediately went into battle along a line stretching from Alsace all the way into Belgium, with territorials extending the Allied line far beyond the end of the British sector.
To illustrate this point, consider the battle of Mons on 23 August 1914. This clash is well known among British audiences – yet in truth it was tiny in scale, and just one component of the month-long battle of the Frontiers that raged along the Belgian-French and German-French borders.
3. Neutrality was a lie
Despite the protestations of non-combatant nations, complete neutrality was impossible to practise by 1914. Global trade had become the norm, with the result that no single power could produce all it needed to fight a war and supply vast armies on its own. Instead, it had to call on the resources and manufacturing capacity of nominally neutral nations to supply goods and materials.
On a more base and self-serving level, no forward-thinking imperialist nation could afford to be left out when the victors began dividing up the spoils of war. To this end, the likes of Turkey and Italy effectively picked sides as soon as war commenced, and merely delayed their entry into the fighting for as long as possible – or until they were promised the rewards they thought their contribution deserved.
4. The eastern front was just as important as the west
While fighting raged on the western front in France and Belgium, an equally enormous yet less-known war was simultaneously being waged to the east and in the Balkans. Armies numbering millions of troops clashed along the banks of the Drina river (now along the border between Serbia and Bosnia and Herzegovina), among the Masurian Lakes (today in Poland) and across the rolling hills of Galicia, straddling south-east Poland and western Ukraine.
Russians, Germans, Serbs, Austrians, Hungarians, Czechs, Slovaks, Slovenes, Romanians, Poles and more bled by their thousands for their respective kings and emperors. Their stories, experiences and voices have been largely written out of the narrative, their war relegated to mere ‘sideshows’.
However, the impact of these bloody battles in the east was profound, not only on the opening stages of the war but on its onward course. Nothing happened on one side of Europe without affecting the war on the other, and it’s impossible to fully understand the unprecedented scale of this conflict without grasping these events in the east.
5. Many 'German' soldiers weren't German
Large numbers of enemy soldiers facing the BEF in the first action at Mons weren’t really German at all. Instead, several of the regiments that charged the British positions on that day hailed from areas of Germany that had, prior to 1864, been part of Denmark, and a sizeable proportion of those troops were Danes. In total, around 30,000 Danes were conscripted into the German army during the war. Some 5,000 of them would not return from the conflict alive.
Alex Churchill's new book, co-authored with Nicolai Eberholst, is Ring of Fire: A New Global History of the Outbreak of the First World War (Bloomsbury). Alex and Nicolai are trustees of the Great War Group
This article was first published in the July 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine