ABSTRACT

The First World War was a total war on an unprecedented scale, and no segment of the population in the multinational empires could entirely escape its impact. The military fronts in Eastern Europe cut wide swaths of destruction, massacre, rape, and pillage as they moved to and fro across vast lands like the sickle in the hands of the Grim Reaper. In many of those regions of Eastern Europe and the Middle East that were largely spared the direct wrath of the sword, the scepter of imperial administration took on a hard new edge as military institutions encroached on, or replaced, the authority of civil administrations. Mass conscription, the shock of battle and the esprit de corps of combat, the death and maiming of loved ones, the requisitioning of property, shortages and rationing of the most basic commodities, the induction of women into workforces, foreign conquest and military occupation, the outflow and influx of refugees – in these and other ways, the war impinged directly and brutally on most sectors of society. The trauma of the war experience made even people of the least educated classes and remotest regions realize that their daily existence was bound up with politics in ways they might not previously have dreamed possible.1