New book “Ring of Fire” rediscovers WWI’s global story

“Now Europe is a ring of fire,” the Russian poet Zinaida Gippius wrote in 1914, not long after her country declared war on Austria-Hungary. Soon afterward, Germany, France, and Great Britain would enter the fight and begin mass-mobilizing troops. “I look at these lines, written by my hand, as if I was out of my mind. World War!”

Today, the causes and consequences of the First World War can be as puzzling as when Gippius put those words to paper. Fortunately, a new book, Ring of Fire: A New Global History of the Outbreak of the First World War, aims to help a new generation of readers understand how this pivotal moment in modern history began.

Written by historians Alexandra Churchill and Nicolai Eberholst, Ring of Fire distinguishes itself from previous works on the subject in significant ways. Whereas scholarship — including Barbara Tuchman’s 1963 Pulitzer Prize-winner The Guns of August — has often treated the war like a real-life Game of Thrones, Eberholst and Churchill largely operate outside the corridors of power. They instead chronicle the war from the perspective of the 99%: soldiers, students, and urban workers as opposed to emperors and generals.

Ring of Fire also stands apart in its geographic scope. Much of what has been written about the war focuses on Europe, especially the Western Front. Eberholst and Churchill instead pull their camera back to view the conflict on a global scale. From South America to West Africa, they examine how military and financial needs of the European powers changed the relationships between them and their colonies, inadvertently paving the way for post-war decolonization movements.

Though increasingly obscured as its distance from the present moment grows, the First World War is as deserving of our attention as ever. Not only because it planted the seeds for the militant nationalism of Germany, Italy, and Japan, thus cultivating the conditions for World War II, but also in how it shaped the world that emerged after.

Big Think: What about Zinaida Gippius’s words made you think, “This is going to be the title of our book”?

Eberholst: She was looking at the phrase “world war” and reflecting on what that means. It was no longer a localized conflict as many might have initially expected. She realized: This is the entire world at war, and the shift happened in a matter of days.

The dawning awareness of global catastrophe was often expressed through this very phrase: “a world at war.” It started appearing independently in writings from France, Belgium, Russia. People who had no connection to each other, yet were all reaching for the same words to describe what they were witnessing.

Big Think: You have described Ring of Fire as The Guns of August for a new generation. What about these books makes them appealing to different generations aside from their publication dates?

Churchill: The Guns of August isn’t a terrible book — far from it. Tuchman writes beautifully. It was groundbreaking when it was published, but 50 years later, as historians, we felt it was time to open the floor to more voices beyond just the politicians making decisions or the generals leading their armies.

We wanted to write a history from the bottom up, one that focused on ordinary men, women, and children. We’re not trying to make Tuchman’s work redundant. If you look at both books side by side, they provide opposite but complementary perspectives on the opening of the First World War.

Eberholst: Another [difference] was making it truly global and not just focusing on the Western Front, which has been thoroughly covered. We wanted to bring balance and include what’s happening in the East and across the wider world. Those were gaps in Tuchman’s narrative that we felt needed to be addressed.

Big Think: What has approaching World War I from a bottom-up and global perspective taught you about the conflict and its legacy?

Churchill: One thing is how interconnected all the different fronts were. When you write just about the Western Front or the Eastern Front or naval warfare, you’re placing the war into neat little boxes. But when you do that, you miss how those boxes overlap.

We found, especially toward the end of the book, that every event had a ripple effect. For instance, just as the French were desperately hoping for Russian success to relieve pressure on the Western Front, they received the crushing news of the Russian defeat at Tannenberg. That changed the entire dynamic in France.

Eberholst: Another striking thing was that when we looked at events globally, we kept realizing how similar these human experiences were. We kept finding accounts describing what it was like to be at war, what it was like to march, to leave home suddenly, to become a soldier, or to have your family go off to fight. The reactions — shock, fear, and confusion — were universal.

If you stripped away the national identifiers from many of the quotes in the book, it would be incredibly difficult to guess where the person was from. The way people express themselves in letters, diaries, or memories is all so similar across borders.

Big Think: A common question raised in the study of World War I is its connection to World War II. Are they two separate events or a single event with a decades-long pause in between? What’s your stance?

Churchill: I wrote the chapters on the global theaters of the war. One thing that struck me was writing about Japan’s motivations for entering the war in 1914 and realizing they were essentially the same as their motivations in 1940. The seeds for the Pacific Theater of World War II were already there in World War I, which was a sort of prototype.

Eberholst: I kept thinking, “This is the exact same ground fought over in World War II.” Some of these place names are showing up again in today’s conflicts, such as in Ukraine. Also, certain elements we associate more with the Second World War, like atrocities against civilians, are clearly present in World War I as well.

Churchill: In a way, World War I normalizes a kind of violence that made it easier to escalate things during World War II.

Big Think: In collective memory, World War I tends to be overshadowed by World War II. Is this because World War II is more recent, or is there another reason?

Churchill: A big part of it is that the First World War is harder to define in moral terms. It’s more difficult to say, “Here are the good guys, and here are the bad guys.” 

With the Second World War, it’s relatively easy to point to Hitler and the Nazis and say that’s who we were fighting against. But in 1914, the Germans weren’t so different from anyone else. That ambiguity makes it harder to frame the war as a compelling, black-and-white narrative.

Another reason is that things pioneered in the First World War became more extreme in the Second. We’ve all seen footage of the Blitz, but I have a letter from 1915 written during a Zeppelin raid. It describes the fires burning behind St. Paul’s, and it’s almost identical to Blitz descriptions 25 years later.

Eberholst: The scale matters, too. The Second World War was bigger in almost every measurable way: more people involved, more casualties, more destruction.

But the world that emerged after the First World War essentially ended with the Second, and the post-WWII world — with its Cold War and all that followed — is the one we inherited. It makes the Second World War feel more directly connected to our lives, and to our parents’ and grandparents’ experiences.

At the same time, it depends on where you are. In Russia, at least during the Soviet era, the First World War was intentionally downplayed because it represented the old regime. But in Serbia, it remains incredibly present. I remember seeing a video from a concert where they played a song about a 1915 Serbian battle. The song started with a speech by a general, and the entire crowd knew the speech by heart. I don’t think there’s any other country where a First World War speech could be that culturally ingrained.

Big Think: Both of you are involved with the Great War Group, a nonprofit that promotes the study of and education on World War I. What about the war do you regard as relevant and important today?

Eberholst: Even though I just said World War II shaped the world we live in, it’s also true that it was, in many ways, a consequence of World War I. The First World War is really where our modern history begins.

It wasn’t inevitable the way the Second World War feels in hindsight. WWI was a rupture, and it triggered so many long-term effects: the rise of the Soviet Union as a direct result of the Russian Revolution, which was itself a product of the war, and the long-standing instability in the Middle East due to postwar border decisions. The same goes for small things, like daylight saving time, which was introduced during the war to maximize working hours.

Churchill: The war also sparked advances in medicine and technology that are still with us. Modern facial reconstruction and plastic surgery? Both started with World War I. Prosthetic limbs became much more advanced because of the sheer number of amputees. The war pushed innovation in so many areas — some grim, but many that ultimately benefited society.

Big Think: Do you think interest in World War I has grown following its centenary?

Eberholst: While there’s been a lot of discussion about the centenary and whether it achieved what it set out to, I do think it had a lasting impact. Besides the big Hollywood movies, there has also been a lot of interest in the lesser-known aspects of the war, especially from independent creators. 

For example, YouTube channels started diving into details that most people wouldn’t have considered. One channel, The Great War, actually did a week-by-week video breakdown of the First World War. They gained a big following, and suddenly, topics like Austria-Hungary’s role in the war became more popular. Names like Conrad von Hötzendorf, who you don’t often hear about, became more widely known.

Even on Twitter, people started talking more about previously neglected sides of the war. It became almost a meme in some circles, and now it’s still an ongoing joke in military history podcasts. The war isn’t just being remembered for the big events anymore; people are looking at the little-known parts, and that’s interesting.

Big Think: How do you expect both scholarly and popular understanding of the war to develop in the future?

Churchill: The last British veteran passed away in 2009, so we’re in a period now where we no longer have any living witnesses to the war. That changes how we write about it [because] there’s a difference between writing about a conflict when you can still speak to survivors and when you’re forced to rely solely on evidence.

When veterans are around, it’s much harder to treat their testimonies dispassionately. It’s not just about history; it’s about memory, and memory does strange things to people. Once the veterans are gone, we’re able to take a step back and approach the material in a different way, which can lead to new insights. But it also means we lose the direct connection to the lived experience.