Why was the first world called the war to end all wars?

Answer 1

Because it was such a savage war--fought mostly in trenches dug across disputed territories by soldiers ill-equipped for bad weather (see trench warfare)--World War One was described as the "war to end all wars" by the world's newspapers. It was believed that warfare had become so horrifying--remember that no previous war had been so covered in the international press--that there would never be another war. Men were in the trenches for months at a time. Crowded, damp or even soaking conditions encouraged disease, depression and suicide. Mustard gas attacks crippled or killed thousands. In 1914, there was no such thing as leave, and certainly no relief from the trenches except injury or death. In trench warfare, few advances could be made because that entailed hundreds of soldiers pouring out of the trenches and crossing open country under fire from opposition forces. Trenches were protected from anything other than the most silent of strikes on the darkest of nights by spiralling twists of razor wire. During chaotic attempts to advance, companies brought along bridges that could be laid over the razor wire but under unrelenting machine gun and carbine fire, this was very dificult. Hundreds of men could be lost in a small foray, and because there was no Geneva Convention at that time that allowed for the recovery of the dead, the "no man's land" between one force's trenches and another's was often covered with bodies for days or weeks at a time. World War One's PTSD was called "shell-shock" and many soldiers who had witnessed the horrible wounds made by grenades, the festering sores on the feet of comrades caused by weeks of standing in the mud, the scene of thousands of bodies caught on the wire or lying in the fields being picked apart by crows, the starvation, the scorched earth and dead horses were never the same. It was believed and hoped that the memory of this--the impact of losing almost all of your nation's population of young men, the survivors with their crutches and bandaged stumps, the wheezing of men who had breathed too much mustard gas before deploying their masks, the miles of trenches and open craters, of winter conditions where frostbite claimed toes, feet, hands, noses--would cause humans to turn away from war as a settler of disputes.