Military dead
About 9-11 million, with Russia, Germany, France and Austria-Hungary the largest.
Darker cells mean a higher score for this topic on that metric.
Scale88
Intensity90
Duration48
Tech shift85
Political impact92
Cultural memory88
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Quick answers
Are the scores a ranking of nations or armies?
No. Scores are browsing aids inside an era-bounded atlas — not live league tables of countries.
How many died?
About 15-22 million dead is the usual scholarly band, plus the 1918-19 influenza that killed tens of millions more worldwide, including many already weakened by the war. Military dead are better counted than civilians.
Why did it start?
No single cause. Alliance commitments, militarism, imperial rivalry, the Balkan crises, and a July 1914 diplomatic failure all appear in standard accounts. Historians still argue about German war aims and shared responsibility.
Why is the Western Front so famous in English?
That is where British, dominion and (from 1917) US armies fought longest. Poetry, photography and the density of cemeteries in France and Flanders created a portable memory. Other fronts were as deadly for those who fought there.
What was the Treaty of Versailles?
The 1919 treaty with Germany: territorial losses, disarmament clauses, Article 231 ("war guilt"), and reparations. It was one of several treaties. The US never ratified it.
Did tanks and aircraft decide the war?
They mattered increasingly in 1918, together with artillery-infantry methods and German economic collapse. They did not make 1916 "modern" in the later Second World War sense.
About 15-22 million dead is the working band. France and Germany lost a generation of young men; Serbia and the Ottoman Armenian population suffered catastrophic civilian shares.
Disabled survivors, war widows and village memorials were a decades-long social cost in every belligerent.
Bands
Civilian dead
Several million from siege, massacre, deportation and hunger -- plus disputed Ottoman figures.
Wounded
Tens of millions of wound cases; many men were hit more than once.
Influenza overlap
The 1918-19 pandemic is adjacent: war transport spread it; it is not simply "war deaths".
Debt and inflation
Belligerents left gold convertibility and entered a decade of monetary politics.
Regions
France/Belgium
The wrecked zone (zone rouge), still with unexploded shells a century later.
Germany
Unoccupied in 1918, politically exploded; the myth of an undefeated army took root.
Russia
Defeat, revolution, and a civil war that killed more than the German front had.
Ottoman lands
Arab provinces under mandate; Anatolia in wars of succession; Armenian death marches.
British Empire
Dominion nationhood stories (Vimy, Gallipoli) and Indian political awakening.
United States
A short, late, decisive intervention and a retreat from the League.
Key numbers
Deaths (range)about 15-22 million
Armistice11 Nov 1918
US entry6 Apr 1917
Versailles28 Jun 1919
Makers
Krupp and heavy industry
German steel and guns as the Central Powers' industrial core.
British Admiralty/yards
Blockade and convoy -- sea power as economic war.
French Schneider/Creusot
Artillery and the recovery after 1914's lost industrial northeast.
US mass production
Late but large: Liberty engines, destroyers, credit.
Railway states
All sides: mobilisation was a timetable before it was a battle.
Medical services
RAMC, French services, and the new visibility of psychiatric injury.
The 1918-19 influenza is usually counted separately but killed through a world the war had already mixed and malnourished.
Reparations figures became political myths; actual transfers were smaller than speeches implied, yet the politics were real.