1914 The First World War in Photographs: Over by Christmas

1914: the first year of the ‘war to end all wars’, documented through old photographs. In 1914, after more than a decade of sabre-rattling, arms races and localised wars, mainland Europe erupted into the greatest war man had ever seen. The assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand saw the beginning of a conflict that was, according to some, going to be over by Christmas but which, in reality, lasted over five years. With battles on all fronts, from Russia to the Falklands, West Africa to China and the Middle East, at sea, on land and by the fledgling air forces of the world, 1914’s war culminated in the famous football match on the Western Front on Christmas Day, but also saw the invasion of neutral Belgium, the Battle of the Marne and the sinking of the Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosse. The photographs tell the story of the world at war in a graphic and telling way.

The First World War changed the art of war forever, and not in a nice way. John Christopher and Campbell McCutcheon document the horrors of war in the photographs of those times.