1917-1918: Crisis, Collapse, and Armistice

By 1917, nearly three years of attritional warfare had pushed several armies to the breaking point. The French army mutinied in the wake of the failed Nivelle Offensive of April 1917, which had promised a decisive breakthrough within 48 hours but instead produced more than 180,000 casualties for no territorial gain; General Philippe Pétain restored order through a mix of limited discipline and improved conditions rather than mass repression. Italy suffered a comparable collapse of morale at Caporetto that October, and in Russia the strains of war fed directly into the revolutions of 1917, which brought down the tsarist regime in February and installed a Bolshevik government under Vladimir Lenin in October.