147 Fun Facts About World War I

What event is often cited as the immediate cause of World War I?

The assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand nearly failed: an earlier bomb missed, then his driver took a wrong turn in Sarajevo and stalled the car right beside Gavrilo Princip.

Which country first declared war in World War I?

Austria-Hungary blamed Serbia for the crisis and declared war on 28 July 1914; Russia mobilised in Serbia's defence and Germany then declared war on Russia and France.

Which alliance of Britain, France and Russia faced the Central Powers in World War I?

The Triple Entente was an informal understanding, not a war pact: it grew from deals that settled London's colonial quarrels with France in 1904 and with Russia in 1907, with no promise to fight.

What did contemporaries call the 1914–1918 conflict before a second world war renamed it?

The Great War stayed the usual name until 1939, yet 'First World War' was already in print: Charles Repington used it as the title of his war diaries in 1920.

What was Germany's plan for a swift Western Front victory at the start of World War I called?

The Schlieffen Plan aimed to beat France through neutral Belgium within the six weeks Russia was expected to need to mobilise; the march through Belgium brought the British Empire into the war.

In September 1914, Paris's military governor rushed reinforcements to the Marne front in hundreds of commandeered what?

Taxicabs: General Gallieni commandeered hundreds of Paris cabs to shuttle infantry toward the Marne overnight; the drivers dutifully kept their meters running, and the French treasury paid the fares.

Which 1916 naval battle was World War I's only full-scale clash of battleships?

Jutland cost Britain 14 ships to Germany's 11, yet the blockade held and the German battle fleet spent most of the rest of the war in port.

The Gallipoli Campaign was an Allied operation aimed at opening a new front against which power?

The Gallipoli campaign of 1915 aimed to force the Dardanelles, open a supply route to Russia and knock the Ottoman Empire out of the war; British, French and ANZAC troops landed on 25 April 1915.

The Western Front during World War I was primarily characterized by what type of warfare?

The Western Front became synonymous with trench warfare, a brutal and stagnant form of combat where opposing armies faced each other from elaborate systems of fortified ditches.

Which August 1914 Eastern Front battle was a decisive German victory over the Russian Second Army?

Tannenberg saw the German 8th Army encircle and destroy the Russian 2nd Army in late August 1914; its commander Alexander Samsonov shot himself, and the victory made Hindenburg and Ludendorff famous.

Which 300-day 1916 battle was the longest of World War I, with immense French and German casualties?

The Battle of Verdun lasted ten months; France held on by feeding the fortress along a single road, the Voie Sacrée, where a truck passed every 14 seconds on average.

Which British fighter of 1917 was credited with shooting down more enemy aircraft than any other Allied type?

Sopwith Camel pilots were credited with 1,294 victories, yet the fighter was notoriously hard to fly: the twitchy handling that made it agile in combat killed many novices in training.

Which Allied nation's casualties on the first day of the 1916 Battle of the Somme were most staggering?

On 1 July 1916 the British suffered 57,470 casualties, 19,240 of them killed, against about 1,590 for the French Sixth Army alongside them.

Germany's last great 1918 Western Front gamble, launched before American strength arrived, is known as what?

The Spring Offensive, also called the Kaiserschlacht or Ludendorff offensive, ran out of steam by July 1918, when arriving American troops restored the Allies' numerical edge.

Who was the President of the United States during World War I?

Woodrow Wilson, the 28th president, won re-election in 1916 on the slogan 'He kept us out of war', won the 1919 Nobel Peace Prize, yet saw the Senate refuse to ratify the Treaty of Versailles he brought home.

Who was the German Emperor (Kaiser) during World War I?

Wilhelm II was Queen Victoria's eldest grandchild, so the war set him against his first cousin, King George V; his abdication was announced two days before the fighting stopped.

Who commanded the American Expeditionary Forces (AEF) on the Western Front during World War I?

John J. Pershing insisted the AEF fight as an independent American army rather than being fed piecemeal into French and British units.

Which British Prime Minister led the wartime coalition from December 1916 to the armistice?

David Lloyd George, the only prime minister whose first language was Welsh, took over in December 1916 after forcing out H. H. Asquith, his own party's leader, over the running of the war.

Manfred von Richthofen, World War I's top-scoring fighter ace with 80 victories, was better known by what nickname?

The Red Baron owed the name to the bright red paint he put on his fighter in 1917; when he was shot down in April 1918, the Allied troops he had fought buried him with full military honours.

Which French general was named Allied supreme commander on the Western Front in 1918?

Ferdinand Foch was given authority to coordinate the Allied armies at the Doullens conference on 26 March 1918; until then the British and French armies on the Western Front had no single commander.

What new weapon did Germany first use on a large scale on the Western Front at Ypres in April 1915?

Poison gas reached the Western Front on 22 April 1915, when Germany released chlorine from thousands of cylinders at Ypres; some defenders survived by breathing through urine-soaked cloths.

What did Parisians first assume was attacking them when shells fell from a 120 km-distant gun in March 1918?

A high-altitude Zeppelin, or aircraft flying too high to see or hear, was the first guess; shell fragments soon proved the blasts came from a German gun about 120 km away.

What was the main wartime job of Germany's U-boat fleet in World War I?

Sinking Allied merchant ships was the U-boats' job: the first attacks came in October 1914, and unrestricted warfare from 1917 aimed to starve Britain out.

How did the 1915 Fokker Eindecker fire a machine gun straight ahead without shooting off its own propeller?

Synchronization gear: Fokker's Stangensteuerung timed the machine gun to fire between the propeller blades, giving the Eindecker the 'Fokker Scourge' of 1915–16 and starting a race that ended with the hydraulic Constantinesco gear of 1917.

Alfred Leete's 1914 recruitment image showed which pointing British figure declaring he 'wants you'?

Lord Kitchener, Secretary of State for War, was the pointing figure; Leete's image first ran on the cover of London Opinion on 5 September 1914 and later inspired James Montgomery Flagg's pointing Uncle Sam.

What nickname did British women who filled shells with TNT earn from the colour it turned their skin?

Canary Girls: the TNT they handled stained munitions workers' skin and hair yellow; hundreds of thousands of British women worked in munitions by 1918, and toxic jaundice from TNT killed some of them.

Which British nurse was shot by a German firing squad in 1915 for helping Allied soldiers escape occupied Belgium?

Edith Cavell had treated wounded men from both sides without discrimination and helped some 200 Allied soldiers escape; the Church of England commemorates her on 12 October, the day of her execution.

On what date did the armistice, ending hostilities in World War I, come into effect?

November 11, 1918: the ceasefire took effect at 11 a.m., six hours after the signing, and attacks went on until then; Henry Gunther, counted as the last soldier killed, fell at 10:59.

Which of these was a major provision of the Treaty of Versailles?

Germany had to pay war reparations, set in 1921 at 132 billion gold marks; the last instalment on the bonds issued to cover them was paid off only on 3 October 2010.

Article 231 of the Treaty of Versailles is commonly known by what name?

Article 231 is the War Guilt Clause: it made Germany accept responsibility for the loss and damage caused by the war and opened the reparations section, though historian Sally Marks notes it never uses the words 'war guilt'.

What name was given to the peace programme the US president laid out to Congress on 8 January 1918?

The Fourteen Points called for open diplomacy, free seas and self-determination; in October 1918 Germany's last imperial chancellor asked for an armistice and peace talks on their basis.

Which international body, founded in 1920, did the Paris Peace Conference create to keep the peace?

The League of Nations had its Covenant written into Part I of the Treaty of Versailles, yet its credibility suffered from the start because the United States never joined.

Tomáš Masaryk became the first president of which state, proclaimed on 28 October 1918?

Czechoslovakia was proclaimed in Prague while Masaryk was still in the United States, where he had just issued its declaration of independence; he came home as president that December.

Which secret 1916 deal between Britain and France planned the carve-up of the Ottoman Arab lands?

The Sykes-Picot Agreement, named for the two diplomats who drew it up, stayed secret until Russia's new Bolshevik government published it in November 1917, to the Allies' embarrassment.

Which territory, annexed by Germany after the Franco-Prussian War of 1871, was restored to France by the Treaty of Versailles?

Alsace-Lorraine went back to France without a vote: unlike other disputed borderlands of 1919, its people were given no plebiscite, just as they had been given none in 1871.

What did the Zimmermann Telegram propose in early 1917?

The telegram proposed a German-Mexican alliance against the US if America entered the war, with Mexico to recover Texas, Arizona and New Mexico; British codebreakers intercepted it, and its publication pushed the US toward war.

Asking Congress for war in April 1917, the US president said the world must be made safe for what?

Democracy was the cause he named on 2 April 1917, five months after winning re-election on the slogan 'He kept us out of war'; Congress declared war on Germany four days later.

Which British liner's 1915 sinking by a U-boat turned American opinion against Germany?

The RMS Lusitania sank in about 18 minutes off Ireland with the loss of nearly 1,200 lives, 128 of them American; the German embassy had printed newspaper warnings before she sailed.

What term was used to describe the deadly, open ground between opposing trenches on the Western Front?

No Man's Land is a medieval English phrase for unowned or disputed ground, once the name of an execution site outside London's wall; the trench war made it the name for the strip between the lines.

Which trench condition, caused by prolonged cold and damp, could lead to gangrene if untreated?

Trench foot: prolonged cold and wet brought numbness, then swelling and, if untreated, gangrene; thousands of British cases in the winter of 1914–15 led to whale-oil rubs and enforced sock changes.

What name was given to British battalions of 1914 whose men enlisted together from one town or workplace?

Pals battalions took their name from Lord Derby's 1914 appeal in Liverpool for 'a battalion of pals'; the price came on 1 July 1916, when the Accrington Pals lost more than 580 men, most of those who attacked, within minutes.

Which late-1914 battle in Flanders closed the last open flank on the Western Front?

First Ypres ended the so-called Race to the Sea, in which neither side was really racing for the coast: each was trying to turn the other's northern flank before the room ran out.

Which final Allied offensive of 1918 convinced German commanders that defeat was inevitable?

The Hundred Days Offensive opened on 8 August 1918 and rolled on without pause to the armistice in November, breaching the Hindenburg Line at the end of September.

In the unofficial Christmas truce of 1914, British and German soldiers are famously said to have played which sport?

Football kickabouts between the lines are the truce's best-known scene, though how many real matches took place is disputed; commanders then issued strict orders, and it never recurred on that scale.

What global pandemic swept the world during and just after World War I, killing millions?

The Spanish Flu did not start in Spain: neutral Spain's uncensored papers reported it freely while warring nations hushed it up, and it went on to infect about 500 million people.

Britain began compulsory food rationing in 1917-18 as its supply of which staple fell to six weeks' worth?

Wheat stocks fell to about six weeks' supply under the U-boat campaign; bread was subsidised rather than rationed, and sugar became the first food on the ration in January 1918.

Which neutral country joined the Allies in May 1915 and opened a mountain front against a former partner?

Italy, though a Triple Alliance member, stayed neutral in 1914; the secret Treaty of London then promised it Habsburg territory, and it declared war on its former ally in May 1915.

Cher Ami, credited with carrying the message that saved the US Army's 'Lost Battalion' in 1918, was what kind of animal?

Pigeon: Cher Ami is said to have arrived shot through the breast with the trapped men's plea to stop American guns shelling them, and was awarded the Croix de Guerre.

Which Serbian secret society armed and trained the Sarajevo assassins of June 1914?

Young Bosnia was the students' own circle; the Black Hand, tied to Serbian military intelligence, supplied the pistols and bombs.

Whose four divisions first fought together as one corps at Vimy Ridge in April 1917?

Canada's four divisions attacked side by side for the first time and took the ridge within four days; France later granted Canada the use of the ground for all time for its national memorial.

Under which March 1918 agreement did Russia withdraw from the war?

The Treaty of Brest-Litovsk was signed on 3 March 1918 in the town now called Brest, Belarus, after Trotsky's 'neither war nor peace' stalling; Russia gave up Poland, the Baltic lands and Ukraine.

The 1917 Balfour Declaration took the form of a letter addressed to whom?

Lord Rothschild, a zoologist and former MP as well as a leader of British Jewry, was asked to pass the letter on to the Zionist Federation; it reached the newspapers a week later.

A besieged British-Indian garrison surrendered at Kut on the Tigris in 1916, in what is now which country?

Iraq: Kut lies downriver from Baghdad, and the failed attempts to relieve it cost more casualties than the whole garrison that finally surrendered after nearly five months under siege.

Off which country's coast did von Spee beat the Royal Navy at Coronel in November 1914?

Coronel lies on the coast of Chile; there on 1 November 1914 von Spee sank the armoured cruisers Good Hope and Monmouth with all hands for three Germans wounded, but spent half his irreplaceable ammunition.

Which 1917 battle in Flanders opened with 19 huge mines blown under the German front line?

Messines began when 19 mines went up together at dawn on 7 June 1917, a blast reported heard in London; one that was never fired was set off by lightning in 1955.

The 1917 rout at Caporetto is also counted as the twelfth battle of which river?

The Isonzo saw twelve battles; in the last, Caporetto, German stormtroopers and gas broke the line, and a young Erwin Rommel won the Pour le Mérite for a mountain assault that took thousands of prisoners.

Which Ottoman officer's 19th Division counter-attacked the ANZAC landing of 25 April 1915?

Mustafa Kemal told one regiment he was ordering them not to attack but to die, to buy time for reinforcements; the stand made his name, and he later founded the Turkish Republic as Atatürk.

What does the acronym ANZAC stand for?

Australian and New Zealand Army Corps proved too much of a mouthful for headquarters clerks in Egypt, who cut it to ANZAC as a telegraph code name; its Gallipoli landing on 25 April is now Anzac Day.

T. E. Lawrence served as British liaison to which leader of the Arab Revolt?

Emir Faisal, son of Sharif Hussein, led the Arab army Lawrence advised from 1916; their partnership ended with the capture of Damascus on 1 October 1918, and Lawrence backed Faisal at the Paris Peace Conference.

Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck's undefeated guerrilla campaign was fought in which colony?

German East Africa (now Tanzania, Rwanda and Burundi): with about 14,000 men, mostly African askaris, Lettow-Vorbeck tied down some 300,000 Allied troops and surrendered only on 25 November 1918, after the armistice.

The November 1914 Battle of Tanga took its nickname from swarms of which creature?

Bees: angry swarms attacked both sides at Tanga in November 1914, giving the 'Battle of the Bees' its name; the British landing was beaten off all the same by a force a fraction of its size.

Poet Wilfred Owen was killed in action how long before the Armistice?

Owen was killed crossing the Sambre–Oise Canal one week before the Armistice; his mother's telegram arrived on Armistice Day itself, as Shrewsbury's church bells rang out in celebration.

John McCrae's 'In Flanders Fields' was first published in December 1915 in which magazine?

Punch printed 'In Flanders Fields' anonymously on 8 December 1915; legend says McCrae discarded the draft and fellow soldiers rescued it, and its poppies became the Remembrance symbol.

The US Army's 369th Infantry Regiment of 1918 was mainly made up of which group?

African Americans from New York filled the 369th, which the US Army lent to the French; under them it spent 191 days at the front, more than any other American unit, as the 'Harlem Hellfighters'.

What nickname did American infantrymen of World War I carry, long before 'GI' replaced it?

Doughboys was already Army slang for foot soldiers in the Mexican-American War of the 1840s; nobody knows for certain why, and 'GI' only pushed it aside in the 1940s.

Which Tennessee sergeant won the Medal of Honor in 1918, credited with leading the capture of 132 Germans?

Alvin York had first claimed exemption from the draft as a conscientious objector, on the grounds that his church forbade violence; his patrol in the Argonne was also credited with taking 35 machine guns.

Which June 1918 battle, fought largely by US Marines, cost American forces nearly 10,000 casualties?

Belleau Wood cost the Americans 9,777 casualties in three weeks, more than a thousand of them on the first day of the attack; afterwards France renamed the wood Bois de la Brigade de Marine.

Where was the 1918 armistice with Germany signed?

A rail car at Compiègne, the Allied commander's own carriage, hosted the signing; in 1940 Hitler made France sign its surrender in the same car, then had it carried off to Germany.

Which Centre Party politician signed the November 1918 armistice on Germany's behalf?

Matthias Erzberger led the German delegation and signed the armistice in November 1918; the High Command then pushed blame onto civilian politicians, feeding the 'stab-in-the-back' myth, and nationalists murdered him in 1921.

To which neutral country did Germany's emperor flee in November 1918?

The Netherlands refused Allied demands to hand the ex-Kaiser over for trial; he bought a manor house at Doorn, lived there until his death in 1941 and still lies in a mausoleum in its garden.

In which room of the Palace of Versailles was the 1919 peace treaty signed?

The Hall of Mirrors was chosen deliberately: the German Empire had been proclaimed in that same room on 18 January 1871, and the treaty was signed there on 28 June 1919.

The 1920 Treaty of Trianon fixed the shrunken post-war borders of which country?

Hungary signed the Treaty of Trianon on 4 June 1920 under protest, losing about two-thirds of its pre-war territory; Hungarians long called it the 'Dictate of Trianon'.

The 1920 Treaty of Sèvres, imposed on the Ottomans, was signed in what kind of building?

A porcelain factory hosted the signing, in an exhibition room of the Sèvres works outside Paris on 10 August 1920; the treaty was never ratified, and the Treaty of Lausanne replaced it in 1923.

French wartime premier Georges Clemenceau was known by which animal nickname?

Clemenceau was 'The Tiger' (le Tigre) for his ferocity in debate, and later 'Père la Victoire'; a physician turned journalist, he had first been premier in 1906 and returned to office in November 1917.

Mata Hari, shot by France as a German spy in 1917, was of which nationality?

Mata Hari was Dutch, born Margaretha Zelle in Leeuwarden in 1876; her stage name is Malay for 'sun', and later biographers argue the French Army needed a scapegoat when it shot her in October 1917.

The Easter Rising against British rule erupted in April 1916 in which city?

Dublin: about 1,200 Volunteers and Citizen Army members seized the General Post Office and other buildings on 24 April 1916; Eoin MacNeill's countermanding order had kept most of the country quiet.

What happened to the interned German High Seas Fleet at Scapa Flow in June 1919?

Its own crews sank it on Admiral von Reuter's order, for fear the ships would be seized: 52 of 74 went down, and the wrecks left on the seabed have since supplied low-background steel.

Ludendorff called 8 August 1918 'the black day of the German Army' after which battle?

Amiens opened on 8 August 1918 behind hundreds of tanks, with no warning bombardment; Ludendorff was shaken less by the lost ground than by the mass German surrenders.

Which Allied nation led the 1914 siege that took the German port of Tsingtao in China?

Japan declared war on Germany in August 1914 and took Tsingtao that November with a small British contingent; the brewery founded there under German rule in 1903 gave the world Tsingtao beer.

What did the Germans themselves call the position the British named the Hindenburg Line?

Siegfriedstellung was the German name, after the dragon-slayer of legend, with sister positions called Wotan and Hunding; built in the winter of 1916-17, the shorter front could be held with fewer troops.

Who replaced Nivelle as French commander-in-chief in May 1917 and calmed the army's mutinies?

Philippe Pétain took over on 15 May 1917 after Nivelle's promised 48-hour victory had failed; he restored order with better leave and rations and few executions, and switched France to a defensive posture.

How did General Allenby enter Jerusalem's Old City on 11 December 1917?

On foot: Allenby dismounted and walked through the Jaffa Gate to show respect for the holy city; the British prime minister hailed its capture as 'a Christmas present for the British people'.

Which mounted troops charged the Beersheba defences with bayonets on 31 October 1917?

The 4th Australian Light Horse Brigade were mounted infantry without swords, so they charged Beersheba with bayonets in hand and rifles slung, taking the town and its wells before dusk.

Which British steel helmet of 1915, mocked by German soldiers as the 'salad bowl', bore its designer's name?

The Brodie helmet, patented in London by John Brodie in 1915, could be pressed from a single sheet of steel; it was rushed out as shrapnel caused ever more head wounds, and the US Army copied it in 1917.

What was dazzle ship camouflage actually meant to do?

Dazzle was meant to confuse estimates of course and speed, not to hide the ship: a U-boat captain had to judge both through a periscope before firing. Marine artist Norman Wilkinson is credited with it.

The word 'tank' was a cover name; the first hulls were described in shop orders as what?

Water carriers was the cover story, but in one account the initials WC, British shorthand for a toilet, put the committee off, and 'tank' was chosen instead.

Armoured vehicles first went into action on 15 September 1916 at which Somme battle?

Flers-Courcelette saw tanks go into battle for the first time on 15 September 1916: 49 were assigned, but a number broke down before the start line and only a handful got through.

Which French pilot ended the war as the top Allied ace with 75 confirmed victories?

René Fonck's 75 confirmed victories made him the top Allied ace; he claimed 142, and counting probables his true tally may have topped 100, yet he was never once wounded.

Which Australian cruiser ran the German raider Emden aground at the Cocos Islands in 1914?

HMAS Sydney caught Emden at the Cocos Islands on 9 November 1914 and pounded her until she was beached on North Keeling; Emden's stranded landing party seized the schooner Ayesha and eventually made it back to Germany.

The first German airship raid on Britain, in January 1915, bombed which East Anglian fishing port?

Great Yarmouth was hit by L 3 on the night of 19 January 1915, with King's Lynn struck by L 4 after strong winds diverted both airships from the Humber; four people died and damage was put at £7,740.

The 'Big Bertha' howitzers that smashed Liège's forts in 1914 were built by which firm?

Krupp of Essen built the 42 cm 'Big Bertha' (M-Gerät); only two existed when war began, and they reduced Liège's forts in August 1914, though the name was later confused with the 1918 Paris Gun.

Which revolution forced Tsar Nicholas II to abdicate in March 1917?

The February Revolution keeps its date from Russia's old Julian calendar, then 13 days behind the West's: the tsar abdicated on 15 March 1917 by Western reckoning, ending 304 years of Romanov rule.

Who wrote the 1929 novel All Quiet on the Western Front?

Erich Maria Remarque's novel sold 2.5 million copies in 22 languages in 18 months; the Nazis burned it in 1933 and stripped him of German citizenship in 1938.

Which British battleship of 1906 made every older warship obsolete and gave its name to a whole type?

HMS Dreadnought set off a naval arms race with Germany, yet never fought another battleship: her only kill was a U-boat she rammed in 1915, the sole battleship confirmed to have sunk a submarine.

Which Nobel-winning scientist equipped vans with X-ray machines and took them to the French front in World War I?

Marie Curie studied radiology, anatomy and car mechanics so she could run the mobile X-ray units herself; the vans, nicknamed 'petites Curies', helped surgeons decide when a limb could be saved.

The Ottoman armistice of 1918 was signed aboard HMS Agamemnon off which Greek island?

Lemnos: the Armistice of Mudros was signed in Mudros harbour aboard HMS Agamemnon on 30 October 1918, taking the Ottoman Empire out of the war and opening the Dardanelles to the Allies.

Which battle of October-November 1918 broke the Habsburg army on its Alpine front?

Vittorio Veneto opened a year to the day after the rout at Caporetto; within days hundreds of thousands of Habsburg troops had surrendered, and the Villa Giusti armistice took effect on 4 November.

Which children's book character was named after a bear cub a Canadian army veterinarian left at London Zoo in 1914?

Winnie-the-Pooh took his first name from Winnie, a black bear called after the city of Winnipeg. Lieutenant Harry Colebourn bought her from a hunter on his way to the war, and A. A. Milne's son later visited her often.

Which future film-studio founder forged his birth date at 16 to drive Red Cross ambulances in France in 1918?

Walt Disney had been turned away by the army as too young, so he altered his birth certificate and joined the Red Cross. He reached France just after the fighting stopped and drew cartoons on the side of his ambulance.

Which name did Russia's capital take in August 1914 because the old one sounded too German?

Petrograd replaced the Germanic 'Sankt' and 'Burg' within a month of war breaking out between the two empires. A decade later the city was renamed again, this time after a revolutionary.

During World War I, American makers relabelled sauerkraut as which kind of 'cabbage' to shed its German name?

Liberty cabbage was only one of the wartime rebrands: German measles became 'liberty measles' and dachshunds 'liberty pups'. Sauerkraut got its own name back once the war ended.

Which red flower, blooming across the churned-up fields of Flanders, became World War I's emblem of remembrance?

Poppy seeds can lie in the soil for years and sprout when it is disturbed, so shelling brought the flowers out between the trench lines. American professor Moina Michael vowed in 1918 always to wear one.

Which measure did the German Empire adopt nationwide in April 1916, before Britain or America, to save coal?

Daylight saving time began as a wartime fuel measure: German clocks went forward on 30 April 1916 so that evenings needed less lighting. Britain followed just three weeks later.

Which future crime novelist learned about poisons while dispensing drugs at a Torquay hospital during World War I?

Agatha Christie qualified as an apothecary's assistant in 1917, and the murder method in her first detective novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles, came straight out of that dispensary work.

Which sister ship of the Titanic sank in the Aegean in 1916 after hitting a mine while serving as a hospital ship?

Britannic went down in 55 minutes, yet 1,036 of the 1,066 people aboard were rescued. One survivor, Violet Jessop, had already lived through the loss of the Titanic four years earlier.

Which future prime minister was First Lord of the Admiralty in 1914 and later commanded a battalion in the trenches?

Winston Churchill left the government in November 1915 after the failed Dardanelles attack and spent the first months of 1916 leading the 6th Royal Scots Fusiliers on the Western Front.

Which Irish town did British troops of World War I sing was 'a long way' away in a music hall song?

Tipperary got its song from a five-shilling bet: Jack Judge wagered he could write and perform a new number by the next night. The Connaught Rangers were heard singing it in Boulogne in August 1914.

Which 19-year-old Bosnian Serb student fired the two fatal pistol shots from a Sarajevo street corner on 28 June 1914?

Gavrilo Princip was spared the death penalty because he was 19 and was given twenty years instead. He died of tuberculosis in prison in April 1918, before the war was over.

Which British king, first cousin to both the German Kaiser and the Russian Tsar, reigned throughout World War I?

George V swapped his dynasty's German name, Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, for Windsor in July 1917 to calm anti-German feeling at home.

Which Austrian-born message runner in a Bavarian regiment won the Iron Cross First Class, rare for a lance corporal?

Adolf Hitler was put forward for the medal by Hugo Gutmann, a Jewish officer in his regiment. Two years earlier a blast at the Somme had wounded him in the thigh.

Which exiled revolutionary did Germany send home by train from Zurich in April 1917 to weaken Russia's war effort?

Vladimir Lenin travelled with 31 other Russian exiles in what was billed as a sealed carriage. By November his party had overthrown the government, and it soon took Russia out of the war.

Which nickname for the ordinary British soldier came from a sample name printed in War Office forms from 1815?

Tommy is short for Tommy Atkins, the invented private whose name filled in the specimen pages of the Soldier's Account Book and who signed with a mark.

What did groups of British women hand to men in civilian clothes from August 1914 to shame them into enlisting?

A white feather stood for cowardice, and Admiral Charles Penrose-Fitzgerald organised young women to hand them out in public. Soldiers home on leave could find themselves presented with one too.

Which part of the British Empire sent over a million troops overseas, the first landing at Marseille in September 1914?

India had almost 1.3 million men volunteer by 1918, and its first divisions were in battle on the Western Front by October 1914. Nearly 700,000 of its soldiers served in Mesopotamia.

Which science-fiction author's 1914 newspaper articles gave World War I the hopeful label 'the war that will end war'?

H. G. Wells gathered the articles into a book called The War That Will End War within months of the outbreak. By 1932 he was using the phrase ironically in one of his novels.

Which two-word term for soldiers' mental breakdown did psychologist Charles Myers put into print in The Lancet in 1915?

Shell shock was first blamed on the blast of exploding artillery rounds, but the same symptoms kept appearing in men who had never been near an explosion.

Trench fever, which struck J. R. R. Tolkien in France in October 1916, was spread among soldiers by which parasite?

Body lice carried the bacterium behind trench fever, which accounted for a fifth to a third of all British troops reporting sick. Tolkien's chaplain wrote of officers being eaten by 'hordes' of the insects.

In which London church was Britain's Unknown Warrior buried 'amongst the kings' in 1920, in soil from the battlefields?

Westminster Abbey keeps the grave under black Belgian marble, the only tombstone there on which nobody may walk. Army chaplain David Railton proposed it after seeing a cross marked 'An Unknown British Soldier'.

Which Flemish village gave its name to the 1917 British offensive in which soldiers drowned in the mud?

Passchendaele's battlefield took on the consistency of porridge as relentless rain filled the craters, and guns sank into the earth. The fighting dragged on from 31 July to 10 November.

Which Scottish field marshal commanded the British Expeditionary Force from December 1915 until the end of World War I?

Douglas Haig took over from Sir John French and afterwards pushed rival veterans' groups to merge into the British Legion, which he led as president until his death in 1928.

Off which South Atlantic colony did British battlecruisers destroy von Spee's cruiser squadron in December 1914?

The Falkland Islands were von Spee's own target: he meant to raid the supply base at Stanley, unaware that two battlecruisers had reached the port the day before. His flagship was lost with all hands.

Which Canadian port was devastated in December 1917 when a French munitions ship blew up after a harbour collision?

Halifax suffered the largest human-made explosion the world had yet seen when the burning SS Mont-Blanc detonated. At least 1,782 people were killed and an estimated 9,000 injured.

The German republic proclaimed on 9 November 1918 is remembered by the name of which city, where its assembly first met?

Weimar was chosen for the national assembly because Berlin was too restive after the Spartacist uprising. Officially the new state still called itself the German Reich.

Which future World War II field marshal won the Pour le Mérite as a young officer in the 1917 Battle of Caporetto?

Erwin Rommel earned the decoration for seizing Monte Matajur and then Longarone with far smaller forces than the defenders. He retold those mountain battles in his 1937 book, Infantry Attacks.

Which Michael Morpurgo novel, later staged with life-size puppets, follows Joey from a Devon farm to the Western Front?

War Horse came to Morpurgo after he met a veteran in his village pub who had worked with horses in the Devon Yeomanry. The story follows Joey to France and his young owner Albert's efforts to bring him home.

Which Ernest Hemingway novel follows an American lieutenant in the Italian Army's ambulance corps during World War I?

A Farewell to Arms grew out of Hemingway's own time as an ambulance driver in Italy, where shrapnel badly wounded him in 1918. The Fascist regime thought the novel an insult to the army, and it was not published in Italy until 1948.

Which Peanuts character daydreams of duelling the Red Baron as the 'World War I Flying Ace'?

Snoopy first adopted the persona in October 1965, and in his fantasies his plane has been getting shot down by the same German rival ever since.

Which economist quit the British delegation at the Paris Peace Conference and attacked the treaty in a 1919 bestseller?

John Maynard Keynes resigned in protest before the treaty was signed and wrote The Economic Consequences of the Peace, which fixed in the public mind the idea of a 'Carthaginian peace' meant to crush the defeated side.

Which future Nazi leader became the last commander of the Red Baron's 'Flying Circus' fighter wing in July 1918?

Hermann Göring finished the war with 22 victories and took over the wing after Richthofen's successor was killed. Two decades later he was building and commanding the Luftwaffe of the Third Reich.

Which French aviator fitted deflector wedges to his propeller blades in 1915 so a machine gun could fire through them?

Roland Garros scored three victories with the device before he was forced down behind German lines and captured. The Paris stadium that stages the French Open was named in his memory in 1928.

What name was given to the German assault infantry trained from 1915 to break trench lines with infiltration tactics?

Stormtroopers grew out of an experimental detachment refined by Captain Willy Rohr, who tried body armour and shields before deciding that speed was the better protection.

What is the German name for the spiked leather helmet that the steel Stahlhelm began to replace in 1916?

Pickelhaube helmets were boiled leather topped with a metal spike meant to deflect sword strikes, little help against artillery. Once replaced, they survived only as ceremonial wear for senior officers away from the front.

Beneath which Belgian monument to the missing do buglers close the road and sound the Last Post every evening at eight?

Menin Gate carries the names of 54,395 Commonwealth soldiers with no known grave, and it still proved too small for everyone it was meant to list. The nightly ceremony was founded in 1928.

A legend that phantom bowmen or angels shielded retreating British troops grew up around which August 1914 battle?

Mons gained its angels after Arthur Machen published 'The Bowmen', a tale of ghostly Agincourt archers that his newspaper never labelled as fiction. Readers who believed it wrote asking for his evidence.

The German naval mutiny of November 1918 that toppled the monarchy is named after which Baltic port?

Kiel rose after crews at Wilhelmshaven refused orders to sail for a last battle with the British Grand Fleet. Within days the sailors' and workers' councils had swept away the Hohenzollern monarchy.

Which Christian minority of the Ottoman Empire was sent on death marches to the Syrian desert from 1915?

Armenians numbered about two million in Ottoman lands in 1914, and around one million were killed. Raphael Lemkin, who coined the word genocide in 1944, counted their fate among the century's most significant.

Which animals complete 'lions led by ...', the popular jibe at the British generals of World War I?

Donkeys gave Alan Clark the title of his 1961 study of the Western Front, though the saying itself is far older and goes back to classical antiquity.

Which Russian general gave his name to the 1916 offensive that wrecked two Austro-Hungarian armies in Galicia?

Aleksei Brusilov used artillery with a precision not seen before and sent infantry close to the defences before they attacked. Other Russian commanders failed to grasp what his methods could do.

Which site did General Allenby pick to name his 1918 victory in Palestine, though little fighting happened there?

Megiddo, whose plain is the Armageddon of the Bible, was chosen for its symbolic resonance. The battle itself was won by cavalry, armoured cars and aircraft encircling the Ottoman armies in the Judean Hills.

Which Belgian port's mile-long mole did the cruiser HMS Vindictive and two Mersey ferries storm on 23 April 1918?

Zeebrugge was raided to bottle up the submarines based inland at Bruges. Eight Victoria Crosses were awarded, yet the blockships sank in the wrong place and the canal was open again within days.

Which German fighter ace, known as 'the Eagle of Lille', has his name attached to a famous aerobatic turn?

Max Immelmann's Pour le Mérite led airmen to nickname the medal the 'Blue Max' in his honour. The half loop and half roll now flown under his name may not have been practical in the underpowered fighters of his day.

Which numbered office in the Admiralty gave its name to the codebreakers who cracked the Zimmermann Telegram?

Room 40 got its start from a German naval codebook that Russia passed on after seizing it from the cruiser Magdeburg, which had run aground off the Estonian coast in August 1914.

Allied troops dug in around which Greek port from 1915 earned the mocking nickname 'the Gardeners of ...'?

Salonika became a huge fortified camp for the French and British who landed in October 1915, too late to help Serbia. In September 1918 their offensive finally knocked Bulgaria out of the war and liberated Serbia.

Which German battlecruiser slipped past the Royal Navy to Constantinople in August 1914 and became the Ottoman flagship?

Goeben was renamed Yavuz Sultan Selim and stayed in service as the Turkish flagship until 1950. She escaped the scrapyard until 1973, after West Germany declined an offer to buy her back.

Which French commander-in-chief regrouped the retreating Allied armies and won the First Battle of the Marne in 1914?

Joseph Joffre sacked one of his own army commanders three days before the counter-attack began. At the end of 1916 he was made Marshal of France, the first under the Third Republic, and moved aside.

Which Red Sea port did T. E. Lawrence and Arab irregulars take in July 1917 after a 600-mile desert march?

Aqaba was rushed from the east, the desert side, 'without guns or machine-guns', by a camel force raised from Auda Abu Tayi's Howeitat tribe. The British had feared the port could shelter German submarines.

Which English resort, shelled by German battlecruisers in December 1914, became a 'Remember ...!' recruiting slogan?

Scarborough was bombarded along with Hartlepool and Whitby on 16 December 1914. The raid caused a scandal in Britain, aimed as much at the Royal Navy for failing to prevent it as at the attackers.