World War I was unlike any conflict the world had ever seen. From 1914 to 1918, the Central Powers of Germany, Austria-Hungary, Bulgaria and the Ottoman Empire were locked in a grueling battle against the Allied Powers—Great Britain, France, Russia, Italy, Romania, Japan and the United States.
The advent of new military technologies during the war and the associated horrors of trench warfare led to unprecedented levels of carnage and destruction. By the time the war was over and the Allied Powers claimed victory, more than 16 million people—soldiers and civilians alike—were dead.
French soldiers work together to camouflage a 370 mm railway gun before battle.
French machine gunners take their position in the ruins during the battle of Aisne, in 1917.
French soldiers in Verdun endure the horrors of trench warfare, a strategy that led to rampant disease, shell shock and mass casualties during WWI.
Soldiers in France ready to charge into battle, in an Image titled "Fighting through the night at Mory."
Troops in Passchendaele, Belgium carry a wounded soldier to a medical post for treatment.
A group of Swiss border guards pose behind a fence separating Switzerland and France.
Weathered troops gather behind the French line at Het Sas, near the village of Boezinge in Belgium, after it had been devastated by artillery fire.
Despite destruction all around, the towers of the Our Lady of Reims Cathedral in Reims, France can be seen through the damaged windows of a destroyed building.
Senegalese soldiers serving in the French Army as infantrymen take in a rare moment of rest.
War is all around a little girl, as she plays with her doll in Reims, France, in 1917.
George "Pop" Redding , an Australian soldier from the 8th Light Horse Regiment, is shown picking flowers during the war against the Ottoman Empire in the Middle Eastern theater of World War I. 1918. Palestine.
Some cheerful wounded soldiers wear captured German helmets after the Battle of Neuve Chapelle. The British offensive from March 10-13, 1915 in the Artois region of France lasted only three days, but led to around 11,600 casualties for the British, Indian and Canadian troops, and 10,000 casualties on the German side.
1 / 12: Galerie Bilderwelt/Getty Images
A century on, the magnitude of the impact of the Great War on millions of people’s lives can lose its immediacy. This is especially true since evidence of the fight is largely left to grainy black-and-white photographs and scratchy black-and-white film. Those images can seem distant in today’s world, where war coverage is literally at our fingertips—in some cases available live as it’s happening, and in high definition.
These colorized images help drive home the fact that old photographs and films from the war contain the lives of actual people who witnessed real, unspeakable horrors.
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