Hello and welcome to a history of Europe, Ge Battles podcast.

My name is Carla Rylett, and today I'll be continuing the story of the First World War.

In the last couple of episodes we talked about the fighting in the year 1914 on both the Western and Eastern fronts.

Today we move on to the year 1915, when Turkey and Italy enter the war. The first months of fighting in the First World War

had seen no major breakthrough from any side. The Germans had

captured about 10% of France and reached within 60 miles of Paris, but then reached a stalemate

as both sides fortified their positions, with great long lines of trenches running from Belgium

to the Swiss border. Russia had captured the region

of Gilesia from Austria-Hungary, but had been pushed out of East pressure by the Germans,

and an attempted Austrian invasion of Serbia had been a dismal failure. The Germans had

originally planned to complete victory quickly, but now found

themselves stuck in a war on two fronts. Furthermore, their ally, Austria-Hungary, had performed badly,

yet Germany still had the advantage of being Europe's greatest military and industrial power, and she had the

most professional army of all of the warring nations. The army's heavy mobile artillery and

armaments and its efficient communications and railway networks gave it the capacity to transfer forces around the various theatres quickly.

Never before had conflict of such scale been seen.

No longer was war a struggle between armies, but a fight to the death between whole societies

involving also those at home, thousands of miles from the fighting. The concept of total war

was invented to describe the new idea of an entire country's economy being directed towards war,

factories converted to produce munitions and weapons, and people expected to endure terrible hardship as food supplies

became increasingly limited.

It was also a war characterized by new ways of fighting.

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