1916
Somme's first day kills twenty thousand British
At 7:30 a.m. whistles blew and British soldiers walked in lines toward uncut German wire. By sunset nineteen thousand two hundred forty lay dead. The battle ground on for four months and a million casualties for a few muddy miles of Picardy. A generation was consumed, and the empire bled a wound that never quite closed.
Sykes-Picot carves up the Middle East
In a London drawing room, a British colonel and a French diplomat drew lines across a map of the still-standing Ottoman Empire, assigning future colonies and protectorates to each power. The secret agreement leaked after the Russian Revolution and gave Arabs the first clear evidence of European betrayal. The lines are still there.
Verdun grinds up the French army
German guns opened on the Meuse heights, trying to bleed France white. For ten months the two armies fed men into forts and shell-holes with names like Dead Man and Vaux. Three hundred thousand died in a few square miles of ruined hills. They shall not pass, said Petain. Neither did the Germans, quite.
Easter Rising in Dublin
About sixteen hundred Irish republicans seized the Dublin post office and proclaimed a republic. British artillery shelled them out in a week. The rebels were unpopular until the executions began; fifteen of them faced firing squads, and Irish opinion turned hard. Within seven years Ireland would be free of Britain in everything but the north.
Battle of Jutland
The British Grand Fleet and the German High Seas Fleet met in a single enormous naval battle in the North Sea. The British lost more ships, the Germans lost more morale, and the encounter was inconclusive. Still, the German fleet never came out again. Britain kept its command of the sea until the war's end.
Arab Revolt launched
Sherif Hussein of Mecca, promised Arab independence by the British, raised the flag of revolt against the Ottomans. His sons Faisal and Abdullah led Bedouin armies alongside T. E. Lawrence. The revolt helped break Ottoman power in the Near East. The British and French then divided the Arab lands between themselves, and the betrayal became lasting memory.
Dada born at Cabaret Voltaire
In a Zurich cafe filled with Romanian exiles, German draft dodgers, and Russian revolutionaries (Lenin was down the street), Hugo Ball put on a cardboard costume and recited nonsense syllables. He called it Dada. An art movement based on anti-art and deliberate absurdity had emerged from the disgust of intellectuals at the ongoing trench war.