On the Eastern Front, Germany and Austria-Hungary fought the Russians. Early in the war, in August—September 1914, the Russians suffered serious reverses at the hands of the Germans at Tannenberg and the Masurian Lakes, but did much better further south against the Austrians in Galicia. 1915 began badly for the Austrians, with the expensive failure of an attempt to relieve the beleaguered fortress of Przemysl. In the north, however, the Germans captured Warsaw and pushed on to Brest-Litovsk and Vilna. The Russian army was terribly mauled, and it is a tribute to its sheer dogged resilience that it remained in the field at all.

Following the early failure of the German army commander on the Eastern Front, Field-Marshal Paul von Hindenburg was sent to command German forces there, ably seconded by Lieutenant- General Erich von Ludendorff and Major-General Max Hoffman. From November 1914 Hindenburg exercised overall authority over Austrian forces too, although the Austrian chief of the general staff, General Franz Conrad von Hertzendorf, took a close personal interest in the campaign. The association was not altogether happy, and soon the Germans were to complain that their alliance with the Austrians was like being 'fettered to a corpse'.

In 1916 the Russians responded to French appeals to distract the Germans from their offensive at Verdun by attacking them at Lake Narotch. Although this was a bloody failure, a bigger attack — known, from the name of the commander of the Russian south-western army group, as the Brusilov offensive — was spectacularly successful. The Austro-Hungarian Fourth Army was almost destroyed, and German reinforcements had to be rushed in from the west to stabilize the situation. Brusilov's triumph encouraged Romania to join the war on the Allied side, but the ensuing counter- offensive saw Romanians and Russians alike badly beaten. Most of Romania was overrun, and even long-suffering Russia had reached the end of its tether. Hindenburg and Ludendorff departed for the Western Front, but German authority in the east was strengthened, leaving the Italian Front as the main concern of Conrad von titzendorf, who was himself relieved of his post as chief of staff in March 1917 and sent off to command in the South Tyrol.

In March 1917 the tsar abdicated, and a Provisional Government took power. It strove to remain faithful to the Allied cause, and launched another offensive in Galicia in July. German counter- strokes administered what was in effect the coup de grdce to Russia's military effort. In November a communist coup overturned the Provisional Government, and in December Russia concluded an armistice which was confirmed the following year. Civil war followed in Russia, and although the Germans left some troops to watch their eastern frontiers, they were able to shift most to the Western Front.

Turkey entered the war in late October 1914, and her armed forces received considerable support from Germany, who had sent a substantial training team in 1913.  a Turkish invasion of Russian territory in the Caucasus was sharply rebuffed at Sarikamish in December-1914-January 1915.  The war ebbed and flowed in 1915-16, wih the Russians ha;ving rather the better of it, capturing Erz\erum and Trebizond.

Even this otherwise unimportant front cast a long shadow, for the initial Turkish success in 11)14 encouraged the Russians to ask for Allied help against the Turks. This request played its part in initiating a campaign which had an appreciable impact on the Western Front: Gallipoli.

The Gallipoli peninsula, with its characteristic dog-leg outline, forms the northern coastline of the narrow Dardanelles, which connect the Aegean Sea with the Sea of Marmara. Allied attention was drawn to the area by Turkey's plea for help, and the `easterners', who sought a more profitable theatre than the Western Front, advocated forcing the passage of the Dardanelles to enable an Allied fleet to reach the Turkish capital Constantinople (now Istanbul) and drive Turkey out of the war. There were initial naval attacks in February and March, and landings in April and August. Although there were moments when the allies might have taken Gallipoli, a combination of hesitance and misjudgement among their commanders coupled with dogged resistance and some inspired leadership on the part of the Turks produced stalemate. The Allies withdrew in December 1915 and January 1916.

Italy joined the Allies in May 1915 in the hope of making gains at Austria's expense. Her strategy was to hold the Trentino, Austrian territory jutting down into Italy north of Verona, while attacking into the Isonzo salient Italy's north-east frontier. In a long and bitter series of battles on the Isonzo, too often ignored by Anglo-American historians, the Italian army made painful progress at great cost, but by the summer of 1917 the Austrians, worn to a thread, asked for German help. General Krafft von Dellmensingen's German contingent played a leading part in winning the Battle of Caporetto in October 1917. The Italians lost more than half a million men, and were bundled back to a defensive line just north of Venice. Six French and five British divisions were sent from the Western Front to support the Italians.

The rapid deterioration of Austria's economy and growing exhaustion of her army in 1918 did not prevent further attacks, but the Italians were now able to parry them. In October the Italians launched their own final offensive, beating the Austrians at Vittorio Veneto and pushing on, against diminishing resistance, in an advance ending in an armistice which took effect on 4 November.

The war originated in events in the Balkans, and fighting began early there. An Austrian invasion of Serbia initially made good progress, taking Belgrade, the Serbian capital, but soon stalled in the face of fierce Serbian resistance. In late September the Serbs counter-attacked, retaking Belgrade and driving the Austrians from Serbian territory with considerable loss. However, Allied failure at Gallipoli encouraged Bulgaria, with her own territorial ambitions in the Balkans, to join the Central Powers, and in the autumn of 1915 a combined German, Austrian and Bulgarian offensive crushed Serbian resistance, driving remnants of the Serbian army through Montenegro and down into Albania. The survivors were rescued by Allied ships in early 1916.

Bulgaria's entry into the war had alarmed the Greeks, who feared for their province of Macedonia, and called for Allied assistance. An Allied force was duly sent to Salonika, in north-cast Greece, only to discover that Greece's pro-German king, Constantine, dismissed his pro-Allied premier, Venizelos, and declared Greece neutral.  The Allied however retained a substantial force in Salonika, which at least provided a command for the French General Maurice Sarrail, and ardent republican for whom a substantial post had to be found.  There was some inconclusive fighting agains the Bulgarians in 1916-17.  In june 1917 King Constantine abdicated and his successor Alexander r eappointed Venizelos who brought Greece back into the war.

Sarrail's successor, General Guillaumat, reorganized Allied forces and successfully integrated the Greeks into his command. With the Allies on the Western Front showing signs of buckling under the strain of the German offensive, he was recalled to serve as military governor of Paris. However, his replacement, the resourceful General Franchet d'Esperey, began the Battle of the Vardar in mid- September. The Bulgarians, now denuded of German support, were swiftly beaten, and surrendered on 30 September.

There were two theatres of war in the Middle East. Egypt was a British protectorate, and in February 1916 the Turks launched a half-hearted attack on the Suez Canal. The British followed up its repulse by advancing into Sinai, and prepared positions there for a possible advance into Palestine, part of the Turkish Empire. Turkish attention was distracted by an Arab revolt against their rule, which gained momentum in the second half of 1916 and included guerrilla attacks (in which the British Colonel T. E. Lawrence – 'Lawrence of Arabia' – played a distinguished part) on the long and vulnerable Turkish lines of communication.

In March 1917 the British, under General Sir Archibald Murray, launched the first Battle of Gaza in an attempt to get into Palestine, failed, tried again the following month and failed once more. Murray's successor was General Sir Edmund Allenby, who had commanded an army on the Western Front. In October–November 1917 he outflanked the Gaza positions by swinging through Beersheba on the desert flank and going on to take Jerusalem. Allenby's preparations for a renewal of the offensive were impeded by the steady leeching away of his troops to the Western Front, but in September 1918 he sprang a brilliantly successful attack on the Turks at Megiddo, and took Damascus on 1 October: an armistice was concluded at the end of the month.

The second front in the Middle East was in Mesopotamia, now Iraq. General Sir John Nixon's expeditionary force from India landed at Basra, and began to advance, with inadequate supplies and no real campaign plan, along the Tigris towards Baghdad. Its leading elements took Kut-al- Amara in September 1916, only to be besieged there in December. Attempts at relief failed, and Kut surrendered in April 1916, a serious blow to British prestige, coming as it did so soon after failure at Gallipoli.

Nixon's successor, General Sir Frederick Maude, resumed the advance, winning the second Battle of Kut in February 1917 and taking Baghdad in March. He pushed on up the Euphrates and beat the Turks at Ramadi in September, only to die of cholera.

His successor, Sir William Marshall, consolidated the gains, and although expeditions were sent out to the oilfields at Baku and Mosul, there was little more serious fighting.

There was sporadic fighting in Africa, the Allies overrunning German colonies in Togoland and South-West Africa. The Cameroons held out till early 1916, but in South-West Africa the talented German commander, Colonel Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck, remained in the field for the whole war.  In a brilliant guerrilla campoaign, he held down 130,000 Allied troops.

Although the war at sea contained fewer of the main fleet actions than pre-war theorists had expected it was none the less important.  In 1914 German maritime colonies worldwide- like Tsingatao on the Chinse coast- were snaped uup quickly.

Admiral Maximilian von Spee's German China Squadron, on its way home by way of South America, destroyed a British squadron off Coronel on the Chilean coast on 1 November 1914, but was caught off the Falklands eight days later and almost entirely destroyed. German commerce- raiders caused some losses, and on 22 September a German submarine pointed the way ahead by sinking three old cruisers in the Channel.

In January 1915 a German squadron raided into the North Sea, but the British, alerted by radio intercepts, met it at the Dogger Bank. The action was inconclusive, but the Germans profited by the experience to improve precautions against internal explosions in their ships. The following month the Germans began an unrestricted submarine campaign against all merchant shipping, including neutral vessels, in the waters surrounding Britain. In May the Cunard liner Lusitania was sunk with the loss of over 1000 lives, arousing a storm of international protest, and the campaign was suspended.

Allied vessels were still attacked, and during 1916 there were raids on the British coast. The year's main clash at sea was the Battle of Jutland, fought between the British Grand Fleet and the German High Seas Fleet on 31 May. The Germans inflicted greater losses than they suffered, but were aware that they had courted great risk, and never again ventured out of port.

In February 1917 the Germans again adopted unrestricted submarine warfare, hoping that its effect on Britain would outweigh the risk of bringing the United States into the war. Although Germany had neither sufficient U-boats nor adequate tactics for their use, the campaign did terrible damage: in April 1917, its worst month, the Allies lost half a million tons of shipping. Adoption of the convoy system and increased Anglo-American naval co- operation – for the Americans did indeed enter the war in April 1917 – helped reduce losses. However, the U-boat threat had its effect on the Western Front. One of the objectives of the Third Battle of Ypres, the British offensive launched in the summer of 1917, was taking the German submarine bases at Ostend and Zeebrugge, and the latter was the scene of a gallant raid on 23 April 1918 when the light cruiser Vindictive and smaller craft assaulted the port and inflicted some damage.

The war at sea was inconclusive, and certainly did little to justify the expenditure lavished on surface fleets. However, if the German submarine campaign managed neither to starve Britain out of the war nor to prevent the passage of American troops to Europe, the Allied blockade of Germany was a different matter. The Central Powers ran short of food and military raw materials, and although the blockade no more broke German morale than did Allied bombing a generation later, it led to growing problems on the home front and contributed to demands for an end to the war.

The First World War was indeed a conflict that spanned the globe, and its growing appetite for resources spread ripples of war even where armies and navies themselves did not reach. Yet from the British point of view, then as now, the war had one primary focus, the Western Front.