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The Great War definitively ended the age of Limited War and marked the advent of modern Total War. From the late 1600s until 1914 European wars had been fought within limits which aimed to protect civilians from the effects of warfare by limiting the ways war were fought. The exact rules had be rewritten repeatedly and sometimes broken, but limits had remained until 1914. At the very beginning of the Great War the major combatants committed themselves to fighting the war on a previously unimaginable scale which required the full mobilization of all of society's resources.
Total War was first noticeable on the battlefield, though to soon spread to the home front. In August 1914, the war on the Western Front began when over 2,500,000 French and German troops clashed in a huge running battle that began in Belgium and carried on to the very gates of Paris. The French Army's victory in the Battle of the Marne kept France in the war and inaugurated the period of stalemate and trench warfare which eventually came to define how people remembered the war. Both sides tried to break the resulting stalemate through raising more troops, building more weapons, and through technological innovation. The resulting arms race required the combatant states to mobilize their entire economies and all of their available labor resources in order to raise, feed, and equip armies of millions of men, and in some countries, women. |
