Germany lost more than 2 million men, Austria-Hungary nearly 1.5 million, the Russian Empire 2 million. Meanwhile, Britain was mourning the loss of 800,000 “Tommies,” including soldiers from the Dominions. To offset the losses that had decimated its population, France experienced a wave of immigration in the 1920s, mainly from Poland, Italy, and Spain, and became the world’s second biggest migrant destination after the US. France alone lost 1.4 million soldiers “to the enemy.” Despite the re-annexation of Alsace-Lorraine (on the Franco-German border), which had been lost in 1871, four years of low birth rates had left a gap in the population pyramid. In a Europe deprived of millions of births, the human toll was particularly high.
Those 1560 days of hell changed the world in every respect-demographic, geopolitical, economic, social, and cultural-and opened wounds that would take a long time to heal. This “short” conflict-as it was predicted by the military-had dragged on for 52 months, inflicting a wave of unprecedented suffering on the people in all countries involved. sharp, the bells of all the churches in France began to ring in celebration: the war was finally over.
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