The World’s War

CHAPTER 7 · 1914–1918 · THE GLOBAL WAR · The Great War, 1914–1918

Call it the First World War and mean it: look at how little of this map is parchment. Around four million men from Africa, Asia, the Pacific and the Americas served the European empires — 1.4 million from British India alone, fighting from Flanders to the Tigris; some 450,000 tirailleurs and other troops from French Africa; 140,000 laborers of the Chinese Labour Corps digging the Western Front (marked at Weihaiwei, where they embarked); porters in Africa by the million, conscripted at gunpoint, who died of disease and overwork in numbers — perhaps 100,000 in East Africa alone — that no one tro

The turn: The double promise, 1916.

This chapter is one scene of an interactive atlas: the map repaints as the dates advance, campaigns draw themselves, and every chapter argues its causes and consequences — then a field exam asks you to prove it on the map.