First world warEuropa

First world war: 15 legacies still with us todayThe great war may have been destructive, but it also generated so many startling developments  – in medicine, warfare, geopolitics and social relations - that its influence still resonates today. Here are 15 lasting legacies of the war. If you think we've missed anything, add it in the comment thread

A stone mason restores names listed on the memorial wall at the VC Corner Australian Cemetery and Memorial, Fromelles, France. Photograph: Chris Radburn/PAThe Guardian, Süddeutsche Zeitung, El Paîs, La Stampa, Gazeta Wyborcza and Le MondeWednesday 15 January 2014 09.00 EST

Poisonous gas (TGW 28)The experiment began on 22 April 1915. German soldiers, entrenched in the Belgian medieval town of Ypres, attacked with 6,000 steel canisters of chlorine gas. The wind carried the lethal gas, which was two-and-a-half times heavier than air, across to the British enemies, over a front that ran along some four miles. The gas caught the British soldiers unaware, killing 3,000 of them. In no time all of the sides in the war started to set off their own gas attacks: it wafted over battlefields, made it over exclusion zones and wounded more than a million people, killing 70,000.

One of the characteristics of poisonous gas, which was banned under international law as a chemical weapon in 1925, is its barbarity. On 10 July 1917 German troops shot blue cross (diphenylchloroarsine) shells, whose ingredients combined to cause victims to sneeze violently, penetrating their gas masks. These were duly called "mask breakers".The second characteristic is the indiscrimination with which the gas killed. It is impossible to exactly pinpoint this. Whether they were soldiers, citizens or children, each were killed in the same way.

Week 28 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ziQSzAm9bmQ&index=45&list=PLB2vhKMBjSxMK8YelHj6VS6w3KxuKsMvT

Week 39: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WHvaLDe-xiY&index=68&list=PLB2vhKMBjSxMK8YelHj6VS6w3KxuKsMvT

Shell shock and PTSDPsychological victims of war are as old as war itself. Deuteronomy, the Greeks and Shakespeare all tell us this. But it wasn't until the first world war that science began to understand this properly and essay the kind of diagnoses that are familiar to us today. Even during the war, some medics still thought that "shell shock" or "war neurosis", as it was known, was down to the physical impact of exploding military ordnance.But slowly another theory began to form: that the peculiar symptoms exhibited by huge numbers of soldiers (80,000 in the British army alone) was borne of emotional, not physical, stressors – in particular, the almost suicidal nature of the frontline campaign, the close proximity to death, the hideous sight of watching a friend – or enemy – meet a particularly gruesome end.

Traumatized soldiers shared many common symptoms – from speech difficulties, twitches, anxiety and digestive disorders to more comprehensive nervous indispositions. Doctors found it baffling that these symptoms would often not present until the patient was back in the safe confines of civilian life and why they would persist long after the war was finished.Despite the sudden insights of the first world war, and countless more sufferers in the second world war, it wasn't until 1980 and the aftermath of the Vietnam war that this condition was formally recognized as post-traumatic stress disorder.

The vast majority of men did not recover sufficiently to return to the army or the front. Siegfried Sassoon did,

but not before he'd written the poem, Survivors:

"No doubt they'll soon get well; the shock and strainHave caused their stammering, disconnected talk.

Of course they're 'longing to go out again', –These boys with old, scared faces, learning to walk.They'll soon forget their haunted nights; their cowed

Subjection to the ghosts of friends who died, –Their dreams that drip with murder; and they'll be proud

Of glorious war that shatter'd their pride …Men who went out to battle, grim and glad;

Children, with eyes that hate you, broken and mad."

Burying the Dead: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HoS7FM63Hcc&index=35&list=PLB2vhKMBjSxMK8YelHj6VS6w3KxuKsMvT

Artillery Barrage: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NX4M7MMnmaM&index=90&list=PLB2vhKMBjSxMK8YelHj6VS6w3KxuKsMvT

Low Optimism: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DdFXjK-Hyuc&index=88&list=PLB2vhKMBjSxMK8YelHj6VS6w3KxuKsMvT

Hubris and Mistakes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SVddn9RgBR0&index=66&list=PLB2vhKMBjSxMK8YelHj6VS6w3KxuKsMvT

Conscription (TGW Weeks 10, Week 14"Your Country Needs YOU!", the famous poster featuring Britain's secretary of state for war, Lord Kitchener, encouraged more than a

million men to enlist to bolster the original expeditionary force deployed to France hopelessly unprepared and unfit for a European war. Within a year of Britain declaring war on Germany in August 1914, despite the numbers of enthusiastic young men who joined up (often with their friends and neighbors in what became known as "Pals" battalions) such was the rate of casualties it was clear the country could not continue to fight by relying solely on volunteers.

For the first time in British history early in 1916 the government introduced conscription. Unlike in many continental powers – including France, Germany, Russia, Austria and Hungary, where compulsory enlistment in different forms had existed for many years, in Britain there was no tradition that citizenship carried military obligations, according to Sir Hew Strachan, Oxford University's professor of the history of War. Strachan made the point in his book, The First World War, that the principle of universal military service was introduced in Britain without the

adoption of universal adult male suffrage – Britain had the most limited franchise at the time of any European state bar Hungary.

Britain's Military Service Act was passed by parliament in January 1916. It imposed conscription on all single men aged between 18 and 41. The medically unfit, clergymen, teachers and workers employed in key industries were exempt. Conscription was extended to married men in May 1916, and during the last months of the war in 1918, to men up to the age of 51. Conscription raised about 2.5 million men during the war.

Protests against conscription included a demonstration by 200,000 people in Trafalgar Square. Tribunals were set up to hear demands for exemption, including from conscientious objectors. However, the principle of objecting to military service on moral grounds was widely accepted and, in most cases, objectors were given civilian jobs.

The tribunals' main task was ensuring that men not sent to the battlefields were productively employed at home. As the war went on and more men were sent to fight, the shortage of skilled workers in arms factories became more

acute. Late in 1917 the German Reichstag passed a law obliging all available males between 17 to 60 to work in arms factories.An attempt in 1918 to force conscription on Ireland was strongly opposed by trade unions, nationalists and the Roman Catholic hierarchy.

It was abandoned and served only to increase support for an independent Ireland (though more than 200,000 Irishmen – Catholic and Protestant – volunteered to serve in the British army).

Canada introduced conscription in its "khaki election" in 1917, the year the US president, Woodrow Wilson, also did so, arguing, Strachan notes, "that it was the most democratic form of military enlistment".

Week 10: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hkWqqciony0&index=14&list=PLB2vhKMBjSxMK8YelHj6VS6w3KxuKsMvT

Week 14: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S7_WEbTwOD0&index=20&list=PLB2vhKMBjSxMK8YelHj6VS6w3KxuKsMvT

War technologyThe war that was supposed to be the one to end all wars was in fact the beginning of all modern conflicts, the origin of the "storm of steel", as described by German officer Ernst Jünger in his memoir of trench warfare.With the first world war, the technical revolution reached the battlefields and forever changed the way that armies fought. Technology became an essential element in the art of war. It could be argued that it had already been so throughout history (Could the Spanish colonization of the Americas have taken place without gunpowder? Could Rome have conquered the known world without the superior organization of its military forces?). However, technology never became so important, and above all, so destructive, although it took many battles and casualties to recognize it.In Adam Hochschild's essay about the conflict, To End All Wars, he describes how these novelties came upon the battlefields; the submarine and aerial bombardment of civilians, armored tanks (which weighed 28 tons and advanced at the rate of two miles an hour), toxic gas attacks … But, on top of that, the most important innovation was the barbed wire fences, the most definitive and unassuming weapon used, that held the war back to the trenches.

An American soldier lies dead, tangled in barbed wire on the western front. Photograph: American Stock Archive/Getty Images

Douglas Haig, the much-criticized commander of the British forces in France, wrote of the conflict's end with profound lucidity: "I believe that the value of the horse and the opportunity for the horse in the future are likely to be as great as ever. Airplanes and tanks are only accessories to the men and the horse, and I feel sure that as time goes on you will find just as much use for the horse – the well-bred horse – as you have ever done in the past." Like so many other times, he could not be more mistaken. Flamethrower: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RvRbhOA6lY0&index=54&list=PLB2vhKMBjSxMK8YelHj6VS6w3KxuKsMvTZeppelins: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uyo39aoW1iY&list=PLB2vhKMBjSxMK8YelHj6VS6w3KxuKsMvT&index=41Artillery: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rLSP2PcTkz0&index=93&list=PLB2vhKMBjSxMK8YelHj6VS6w3KxuKsMvTSubmarines: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YzuXLimlO1E&index=145&list=PLB2vhKMBjSxMK8YelHj6VS6w3KxuKsMvT

PacifismBertha von Suttner, who in 1905 became the first woman to be awarded the Nobel peace prize, once jested that humanizing the war was like regulating the temperature when boiling someone in oil.However, when war broke out in Europe, it wasn't just pacifists who were shocked, but many erstwhile war enthusiasts too. (For example, the German writer Kurt Tucholsky had signed up for "drunken nationalism" in the first few days of the war. Now he was disenchantedly calling the war 'a worldwide latrine with blood, barbed wire and hate songs".)

Conscientous objectors at a peace demonstration at Dartmoor, Devon in 1917. Photograph: Bentley Archive/Popperfoto/Getty Images Bentley Archive/Popperfoto/Popperfoto/Getty Images

After the war the pacifists had admittedly more influence than before: about 70,000 members belonged to pacifist groups in Germany, which incidentally was comparatively less than the 500,000 members of the soldiers' unions.Above all though, the war destroyed a part of their primordial self-certainty. Before 1914, the pacifists had dreamed that wars could be contractually banned – it was an unwordly belief, as was shown. Now the peace-lovers strove for a more realistic, modest aim – disarmament, international understanding, reconciliation and a humanization of war through the abandonment of certain weapons.Socialists: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ZRnz8yevj8&list=PLB2vhKMBjSxMK8YelHj6VS6w3KxuKsMvT&index=111

Religious Leaders: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nb_9HO67KMA&index=67&list=PLB2vhKMBjSxMK8YelHj6VS6w3KxuKsMvT

The Middle East legacyThe first world war and the treaties that followed it redrew the map of the Middle East by creating new states and new political realities on

the territory of the defeated Ottoman empire. Rivalry between Britain and France, the growth of Arab nationalism, Zionist ambitions in Palestine and the emergence of modern Turkey all changed the face of the region. It is one of history's neater ironies that lines that were drawn in the wartime sand are starting to blur a century later.

The Sykes-Picot agreement of 1916 secretly divided the former Ottoman lands into British and French zones of influence. The Mandate system created by the interwar League of Nations promised only eventual self-government, not the immediate independence for which Sharif Hussein of Mecca had launched a desert revolt against the Turks – with the help of Colonel TE Lawrence ("of Arabia"). And, in another conflicting pledge, the Balfour Declaration of 1917 gave Britain's support for the creation of a "national home" for the Jews in the holy land – laying the foundations for the emergence of Israel and the world's most intractable contemporary conflict. Historians have been arguing ever since about this tangled diplomacy and its fateful repercussions.

Ethnic, sectarian and tribal differences were of little concern to the colonial-era map-makers. Iraq was formed by merging three Ottoman provinces - dominated respectively by Shias, Sunnis and Kurds. It was also cut off from Kuwait – the genesis of trouble later. Its king was a Hashemite from the Arabian peninsula who had been thrown out of Syria so was the king of neighboring Jordan, created by a stroke of Winston Churchill's pen after a boozy lunch in Cairo in 1921. Lebanon was split off from "Greater Syria" as a home for the Christians whose support would strengthen French influence.

The biggest losers of the postwar lottery in the Middle East were the Kurds. Nowadays this still stateless people enjoy a high degree of regional autonomy – as well as relative peace – in federal Iraq while their compatriots in Syria control areas that are out of reach of Bashar al-Assad's forces.

guardian.co.ukThe very idea of Arab nationalism is under threat by sectarian extremists, who look back to Islam to create a new caliphate (abolished by the newly secular Turks in 1922). Assad's enemies include a leading jihadi group with links to al-Qaida. Its Arabic name is "the Islamic State in Iraq and al-Sham (Syria and Lebanon)" – a deliberate erasure of those post-first world war frontiers. Ottomans Enter the War: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ImrCaFJVQg

Carving the Middle East: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1rTc9yS49q4&index=58&list=PLB2vhKMBjSxMK8YelHj6VS6w3KxuKsMvTArmenian Genocide: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8J1mpAQDMIINeutral Persia and Albania: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=axZibQkE0_s&list=PLB2vhKMBjSxMK8YelHj6VS6w3KxuKsMvT&index=117Britain in Mesopotamia: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BMKg-E7YVpU&list=PLB2vhKMBjSxMK8YelHj6VS6w3KxuKsMvT&index=138

Filmed propagandaIn a conversation with the philosopher Alexander Bogdanov in 1907, Lenin spoke of cinema as "one of

the most important means of education of the masses". The first world war was to prove him emphatically right.

At the start of the war, audiences – and governments – were still relatively new to the idea of cinema. But in the US alone, 2,500 films were produced between 1915 and 1918. Many such as Zepped contained an undeniable propaganda slant to them. Others were produced to more subtle effect, such as The Battle of the Somme – a British effort to appeal to US public opinion and draw America into the war. In Italy, Maciste alpino, by Luigi Romano Borgnetto and Luigi Maggi (1916) emphasizes the values of battle, pushing the audience to identify with the hero protagonist.

But not all of it was pro-war. In Civilization (1916), Thomas Harper Ince launched his allegorical cry for peace. Abel Gance's J'accuse, with some scenes filmed on real battlefields, is undeniably pacifist.But the jewel of the period, dated 1918, is the Charlie Chaplin film Shoulder Arms, which illustrates, halfway between tragedy and farce, the horrors of life at the front.

Week 13: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A9GVIAznl04&index=18&list=PLB2vhKMBjSxMK8YelHj6VS6w3KxuKsMvT

Changes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3VSpajE7aNo&index=69&list=PLB2vhKMBjSxMK8YelHj6VS6w3KxuKsMvT

Capturing the Horrors: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CHNuHsZ59rg&list=PLB2vhKMBjSxMK8YelHj6VS6w3KxuKsMvT&index=104

Nation states

The year 1918 radically reshaped the map of central and eastern Europe. Several new states (or ones recreated after a century) appeared in the place of three powerful empires – Germany, Russia and Austria-Hungary.

The new countries were poor, in conflict with each other and studiously divided by borders and customs duties. It was the era of triumphant nationalism. Countries such as Ukraine suffered the bad luck of

having been unable to successfully fight for their own state because their rivals had proven stronger.

In September 1918, the Austro-Hungarian empire tried to make contact with western powers to ask for a ceasefire. The US, by then the most powerful country in the world and one untouched by the war, replied that its stance had been presented by President Woodrow Wilson in January of that year in his Fourteen Points proposal.

Apart from his postulates of transparent international agreements, unfettered access to the seas and the lifting of trade barriers, Wilson had talked about new borders in Europe based on ethnicity and had also mentioned the rebirth of Poland. As it would later turn out at the Versailles conference in 1919, his postulate of "borders based on ethnicity" would prove to be not only utopian, but also the precursor to many conflicts.In central Europe, nations often lived side by side with each other and claimed ownership of the same

territories. Each resolution passed by the big powers triggered diplomatic protests and, quite often, armed conflict.

guardian.co.ukThe biggest of the new countries was Poland, which had disappeared from the map for 123 years after

being partitioned in 1795. Its territory was reclaimed thanks to armed conflicts with the Germans, Ukrainians, Lithuania, Czechoslovakia and the great battle with Russia. In 1923 when its borders were finally settled, Poland had relatively good relations with only two neighbors – tiny Latvia to the north and a distant Romania to the south. This would soon prove fatal.

And yet the war also produced the League of Nations – the world's first proper attempt at an international peace-keeping organization. Its successes and existence were shortlived, and it would take another world war for the second iteration, the United Nations, to be born.Poland: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ImrCaFJVQgItaly: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JzjjBQl0fu0&index=91&list=PLB2vhKMBjSxMK8YelHj6VS6w3KxuKsMvT

Bulgaria: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9x6P0uCtiPw&list=PLB2vhKMBjSxMK8YelHj6VS6w3KxuKsMvT&index=119Serbia: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7BSMWbUSLyI&list=PLB2vhKMBjSxMK8YelHj6VS6w3KxuKsMvT&index=132

Women's emancipationHistorians still wrangle over whether the war liberated women. Without a doubt, women accomplished a high number of largely masculine roles during the war. Without a doubt, women achieved the most important political rights in certain countries (such as Britain). Without a doubt, some of the fashions, such as the flapper "garçonne" ("little boy") look, evoked an emancipation of the traditional feminine codes. However, in reality women's work was already on the rise before 1914 and once the war was over, many women went back to their old jobs.

An newly enfranchised woman votes in December 1918. Photograph: Topical Press Agency/Getty Images

The feminization of work is limited and depends on what sector it is in. It grows in business, in liberal professions or in banks. In fact, women are denied quite a few rights (in France, women only won the right to vote in 1944. In Germany they could vote as of 1919, in Great Britain from the age of 30 in 1918, and from the age of 21, like men, in 1928). Often the forms of emancipation of traditional roles were socially and quantatively restrictive. Recent works suggest that this period was a transitional phase, a teaser of the evolutions to come. Week 55: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7cVSjzuvThE&index=55&list=PLB2vhKMBjSxMK8YelHj6VS6w3KxuKsMvT