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Over in Europe, growing nationalism caused the major powers to come into conflict once again, this time as a result of nationalist movements that threatened Austro–Hungarian interests in the Balkans. The assassination in June 1914 of the heir to the Austro-Hungarian Habsburg Empire, the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, and his wife by Serbian nationalists, gave the Austrians the reason they needed to crush Serbia and challenge Russian dominance in the area. With an unequivocal promise of support from Germany, they declared war. When Russia mobilised its forces, this made Germany nervous. When Germany put its armed forces on notice this made France nervous. Before long, France, Russia and Great Britain allied themselves against the Central Powers of Germany, Austro-Hungary and the Ottoman Empire.
The war rapidly became one fought on two fronts by the Germans, against the French and British (plus dominions) in the west, and against Russia in the east, with the British and German navies battling it out on the seas. An attempt in 1915 to open up another front in Turkey by capturing Constantinople saw a massacre of predominantly Australian and New Zealand troops on the Gallipoli peninsula in one of the greatest disasters for the Allies in the war. Although they still officially deny it, the Turks used the cover of a news blackout to wipe out much of their Christian Armenian population, mainly on forced death marches in which large numbers died of starvation and exhaustion. It is estimated that between 1 million to 1.5 million Armenians and other ethnic minorities were killed or forced to flee between 1915 and 1923 in what was to be the first of many genocides of the 20th century.
While the war was chiefly fought in Europe it soon spread to Asia, the Middle East and Africa. In Asia, the Allies were supported by Japan; in the Middle East, the British sponsored Arab national movements which opposed Ottoman domination in the area, only to cynically renege on any agreement they made at the end of the war. In an attempt to get the Jewish Diaspora in the USA to sway the government to join the war, the British also expressed their support for the creation of a Jewish homeland in Palestine, a declaration98 which they subsequently refused to honour. As with many peoples in the 20th century who found themselves pawns in global power games, the Palestinians were not consulted.
Everyone expected the war to be as short as the last major war in 1870-71 between France and Prussia, but modern weapons led to a stalemate of trench warfare and mechanised slaughter. Over a million men died on the borders between France and Germany in the first year, with many forced to make 19th century style charges against enemy machine guns and barbed wire by generals incapable of understanding how the art of war had changed.
Just how badly the Germans had underestimated the Russians in the wake of the Russo-Japanese War was evident by 1915 as they had been forced to commit two thirds of their forces to the Eastern Front even as the Western Front had become bogged down in stalemate. Yet the Russian military was untrained and unprepared for the ferocity of the battle, and though on paper it had the world’s largest army, by 1917 this army was on the verge of collapse.