With World War 1 coming to an end, many people tried to pick up the pieces to their shattered lives. They were confused and disillusioned wondering why the war had been fought in the first place. The devastation everywhere was testimony to the fact that not a single nation had come out of the war with its hopes realized. How did it come about that the world was drawn into war in which approximately eight million soldiers gave up their lives to fight? When millions of civilians, as well, were shackled in the process for reasons that even the survivors of war could not remember?
On the surface, the reason most understood to have set the wheels of war in motion was the assassination of the archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo, a small town that was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and also the location to the point blank assassination of the archduke and his wife. Later at the royal court of Vienna, the centre of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, this murder was interpreted as a threat to the very existence of the empire.
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Underlying all the tensions was the race between the major European powers to expand their colonial empires. Possessions from abroad provided Europe with raw materials and markets, needs that had grown out of the industrial revolution this also prompted the spirit of nationalism and also patriotism; which are widely considered a natural and noble sentiment. All the warring countries relied on this sense of patriotism to rally their troops during the