Author's Preface

Summary

We know more or less all there is to know about the way the hostilities of the 1914–1918 war developed. What's still left to be cleared up are just a few details which will not have much of an effect on the general picture of the armed conflict. At the most they'll help to nuance the chronicle of the war. Of course, we won't manage to explain or sort out all the problems. We certainly won't ever be able to establish the precise figures for losses sustained by the belligerents in particular clashes and battles. There will just be estimates. On the other hand, better prospects for research are opening up for historians interested in the soldiers' predicament, in what was going on behind the front lines, in the role civilians, communities, and nations played in the war, in the war economies and everyday life, or in the role of the women who made an energetic entry into a “man's” story. It will be worthwhile to study the stories of individual soldiers and what they suffered, of heroism and treachery, of people losing and recovering their faith in God, of struggling to survive and growing accustomed to death. An area which offers promising horizons for research is historical anthropology, which has the cognitive instruments needed to embark on new paths of study and the effective verification of what has been accomplished hitherto.