Origin of the Name

This was the first “big” European war after Napoleon. Great did not only connotes the great scale of the war, nor the enormous number of men sent and lost. It also was called the Great War, because they thought this was the ultimate war. Before Armageddon or the Biblical battle of Good and Evil, since they thought that the evil militarism had taken control of Germany. This is not to diminish the indeed cruel number of deaths.