When Diplomacy Fails presents the July Crisis Anniversary Project, a day-by-day account of the events that occurred 100 years ago.

Epilogue.

The result of the July crisis was a spectacle of slaughter on a level nobody had or could have foreseen. It was a war that was beyond the imagination of any European statesman.

The plans of every power went up in smoke,

and improvisation became the order of the day.

By November 1914, Russia had lost some 330,000 men in their German campaigns,

meaning that they ceased to be a threat to Germany thereafter,

while Austria-Hungary, bookled under the Russian

offensives in its Carpathian mountains.

The real German goal, the wheeling turn of the German forces through Belgium that had

made the declaration of war necessary, was stopped with the miracle in the marn.

In a combination of German withdrawal to the Eastern Front, the presence of British forces,

and the superhuman resilience of the French, who lost an atrocious amount of men in the opening weeks of the First World War.

The Eastern and Western Fronts were soon joined by the Italians, Romanians and Greeks on the side of the Allies,

and the Ottomans and Bulgarians on the side of the central powers.

These new fronts provided new theatres where inexperienced statesmen who thought they knew

the realities of warfare planned grand strategies that served only to send hundreds of thousands of

more men to their deaths. Whether high up in the Alps, in the desert wastelands of Africa or in the

no man's land of Flanders, or was soon being fought on a scale that the industrialized nations of the

world had apparently worked towards for the past century, with little idea how to use their

killing machines, or why they were even there in the first place. So rapidly had the declarations of war come, after the apparent quiet of the month of July,

and so horrific was the opening month of August for all involved,

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