In the late summer of 1914, Europeans committed to a war so violent and traumatic that it fundamentally changed the continent and the world. The First World War transformed cultural identities, systems of government and economies (Müller 2011: 16). It polarised societies along ideological, class and ethnic lines. Europe’s Great Powers had entrapped themselves in a desperate struggle that drained national resources and sapped morale, enough so for society to lose faith in the political order and quarrel violently over its replacement (Clark 2012). Although the war formally ended on 11 November 1918, the turmoil and deprivations persisted into the early 1920s. The old multiethnic empires were wracked by horrific civil wars, pogroms and ethnic cleansings, and then disappeared. For Europe it would indeed be a long First World War (Gerwarth 2016).

Greece’s ‘First World War’ was even longer. It started with the First Balkan War (1912), which was a dress rehearsal for the larger pan-European conflict, featuring trench warfare, mass armies, the use of machine guns and rapid-fire guns, horrendous casualty rates and mass violence against civilian populations (Hall 2000: 130; Gallant 2015: 316–26). The nation’s ‘long’ war ended in 1922, with the military defeat at the Battle of Sakarya in August, the destruction of Smyrna in early September, and the permanent expulsion of Greeks from Anatolia and Eastern Thrace. By then, Greece and the Greeks had been completely transformed. The country was larger in terms of numbers and territory, its population more culturally and socially complex, but Greek society had been deeply traumatised and its politics hopelessly polarised. The transformative effects of the long First World War are the main subject of this chapter.

The Balkan Wars, October 1912–August 1913

The First Balkan War almost sparked a general European conflict. Russian and Austrian forces were mobilised in November 1912, and if war did break out between these two Great Powers, direct French and German involvement was likely. However, cooler heads prevailed in Vienna and St Petersburg that month (Clark 2012: 268). But in at least one important sense, the conflict did serve as a dress rehearsal for the 1914–18 war.