Wounded
Europe
The war effort exhausted all sides of the conflict. Millions were killed, hundreds of thousands of war invalids returned home. Vast tracts of land in Europe were left in ruins. The war left its mark not only on the bodies but also on the minds of the soldiers. Post-traumatic stress disorder was diagnosed for the first time. A flu, called the Spanish flu, ended up causing a death toll that was higher than that caused by the war itself.
Europe was plunged into a multidimensional economic, humanitarian and ideological crisis. The poorest were affected to the greatest extent. Poverty and a deep sense of exclusion from social advancement became a breeding ground for radical ideology - imarxism and
inationalism.
Victims of the War and the Spanish Flu
Many World War I veterans returned home with deformed faces, many of whom were rejected by society. The American sculptor, Anna Coleman Ladd, helped these unfortunates by creating masks that imitated the parts of their faces which they had lost.
Photo: East News
French soldiers carrying their comrade, who has lost his leg. 21 million soldiers were wounded during the Great War. Estimates concerning soldiers crippled for the rest of their lives range between 5 and 6 million.
Photo: East News/Maurice-Louis Branger
Jules Amar, a French engineer and management theory expert, constructed a range of artificial limbs for thousands of war invalids that would restore to them a modicum of functionality. Previously, artificial limbs had played an aesthetic role, and were intended only to replicate lost limbs.
Photo: East News
A First World War veteran without one eye. Due to the nature of the conflict, which was waged mostly in trenches, injuries to the head were very frequent.
Photo: East News
A young boy who has lost his leg in the shelling of Ypres. He was but one of millions of civilian victims of the war. Ca. 10 million civilians lost their lives in the First World War. The identity of the boy remains unknown, but he might have been one of the 6 million orphans, who had lost one or both their parents during the war. 3 million women lost their husbands in the conflict. The war was a tragedy for countless families.
Photo: East News
A German war invalid begging for money on the street. In 1920, recession swept through the European states. In 1923, Germany experienced hyperinflation. Hundreds of thousands of people lost their jobs.
Photo: East News
The Fall
The Great War swept away the old world order. Faith in the benign development of science was shaken by the fact that its achievements had been used for the purposes of mass killing. Wholesale slaughter on the front led to a contestation of the idea of personalism, an intellectual stance which emphasized the individual dignity of each human being.
The war brought about the fall of four European dynasties: the House of Habsburg in Austria-Hungary, the House of Hohenzollern in Germany, the Ottoman dynasty in Turkey, and the House of Romanov in Russia. New states were established on the ruins of their empires.
Franz Joseph I, who ruled to Austro-Hungarian Empire for over 50 years, may be considered as the symbol of an old world passing into yesteryear. The Habsburg monarchy was a multinational mosaic. Its existence was based on the authority of the ruling house, embodied by the last emperor Franz Joseph I, who was truly respected and beloved by his subjects. Soon after the death of Franz Joseph, the empire could not withstand the desire of small states to be independent, and fell apart.
Photo: East News
The First World War turned upside down the existing division of social roles - in industrial plants, women replaced men who had gone to war.
Photo: The Print Collector/Image State/East News
In the early 20th century, the Young Turks movement came to power in the Ottoman Empire, wanting to modernise what was an underdeveloped state.
Pan-Turkism became its official doctrine, proclaiming as it did the unity of the Turkish peoples living on all lands from the Bosporus to Mongolia. This ideology led to a desire to remove non-Turkish peoples from these lands. The mass persecutions of Armenians, Greeks and Assyrians began in 1915 under the pretext of them favouring the enemies of Turkey. The evictions took the form of death marches. Between 1915 and 1917, over one million Armenians were killed in the Turkish persecutions. Their deaths opened a new chapter in the history of the world – an era of genocides on the grounds of nationality.Photo:The Print Collector/Image State/East News
