Introduction

Summary

In the United Kingdom, the First World War has fastened itself firmly and ineradicably on the public mind. Lutyens’s Cenotaph, the innumerable war memorials up and down the country, and the ordered ranks of white gravestones in the official war graves all remind successive generations of the costs of what is still called the Great War. They also act to anchor that war to the Western Front, where Britain and France fought it out with Germany over four long and bloody years. Transfixing though the great battles of the Somme and Passchendaele can be, the mighty clashes in France and Flanders were but part of a much bigger and more complex war. The pre-war alliances, designed to manage and maintain the peace, changed their clothes to become war-fighting partnerships as Great Britain, France and Russia squared up to Germany and Austria–Hungary. Both sides recruited allies, larger and smaller, as the fighting began not just in Belgium and France but also in the Balkans, in Galicia and in East Prussia. In 1915, the Entente powers were glad to woo Italy away from her pre-war partners and recruit her to their ranks.