The Great War in a nut-shell

The gunman was a Serbian student. Weeks of diplomatic wrangling eventually resulted in Austria-Hungary declaring war on Serbia on 28 July 1914. Several days later Germany declared war on France.

On 4 August 1914 German troops invaded Belgium, which had hoped to remain neutral. Their objective was France. The German invasion brought Britain, which had guaranteed Belgium's neutrality, into the conflict.

A network of treaties and alliances soon meant that this was to become a global conflict.

The major powers also brought their dominions and colonies into the war. In the end over 50 nationalities were involved in the conflict.
 

Belgium was unprepared and had depended entirely on its neutrality.

After a few days chaos reigned supreme.

A week after the invasion Halen in Limburg was the scene of bloody fighting. On 12 August 1914 Belgian forces successfully resisted an offensive by the German cavalry. Hundreds of Germans perished.

The poorly equipped Belgian forces were eager to gain time until the Allies arrived and withdrew to Antwerp.

From here Belgian forces executed a number of surprise attacks on German troops pressing ahead to the River Marne.

Traumatised by their experiences during the Franco-Prussian war of 1871 the Germans committed atrocities in Dinant, Tamines, Aarschot, Leuven and Dendermonde.

This resulted in a wave of sympathy for "Little Belgium" across the world.

After the Fall of Antwerp King Albert withdrew his troops behind the River Ijzer. The brilliant decision to set large tracts of land under water stopped the German advance in November 1914.

The banks of the River Ijzer were turned into a desolate landscape. Allied troops tried to push back the invader. It was here in 1915 that gas was first used as a weapon of mass destruction.

Only a series of bloody battles, in Ieper, Passchendale, Mesen and the Kemmelberg interrupted the trench warfare.

The Great War was first and foremost an international conflict. Fighting took place on the western front, on the Somme and at Verdun, but also in Italy, Russia, Turkey and even in East Africa.

On 6 February 1917 the United States joined the conflict on the side of the Allies. The war had entered a decisive phase.

At 11 A.M. on 11 November 1918 the Armistice took effect: in four years 9 million people had been killed.

40,000 Belgians died for their country. Even more had been turned into war invalids. Thousands of women had been widowed. As many children had been orphaned.

Modern warfare meant that people's injuries were even more horrific than in earlier conflicts. Many soldiers died as a result of diseases caught amid the atrocious conditions at the front.

In 1918-19 hundreds of thousands succumbed as a result of the Spanish flu. Both soldiers and civilians had been weakened through the conflict.

In 1919 reconstruction work started on houses, churches and schools. Society too needed to be rebuilt.

The collective trauma had to be laid to rest: everywhere war monuments in memory of those who died were built.

The army was demobbed in 1919 after the signing of the Treaty of Versailles. Belgium gained the East Cantons and the neutral Moresnet area.

Ruanda and Burundi were placed under the protection of Belgium thanks to a mandate from the League of Nations. War payments imposed by the Versailles Treaty kept Germany in a stranglehold: the seeds of a second world war only 20 years later were sown.