This British recruitment poster exploits the German attack on the Lusitania, a passenger liner. Many controversies surrounding the 1915 incident persist even today.

Wartime bureaucracies grew quickly, and laws were hastily passed to give governments new powers to marshal economic resources and to censor the voices of protest. With the rationing of food, caloric intake across Europe dropped to dangerously low levels. Shortages occurred in every country, especially as the war dragged into 1918.

Government planning boards were organized, subordinating free market capitalism to the war effort and the needs of the state. In Germany, growing shortages prompted the growth of "war socialism." German businessman Walter Rathenau helped to organize hundreds of “war companies” to marshal raw materials and to expand production of synthetics. Labor unions prospered under these conditions. They worked closely with governments directing wartime economies to ensure smooth production, enjoying new bargaining power and status.

British propaganda posters often used women for recruitment purposes and to keep up morale.

As governments expanded, their budgets exploded, sending them scrambling to find the money to fund them. The budget of the French government, for instance, was forty times larger in 1918 than it was in 1914. The new tools of advertising were used to secure borrowing from the public in the form of war bonds.

German debt rose by 3000% between 1914 and 1918. Britain and France borrowed billions of dollars from the United States, which enjoyed economic prosperity from wartime production. Governments also printed new money, which caused devastating inflation after the war ended.

Bureaucracies mushroomed. Before the war, 20 clerks handled purchases of British munitions. By 1918, the Ministry of Munitions employed 65,000 civil servants to handle the task. Women, who entered the work force in great numbers to replace the men sent into battle, took some of these positions.

British women drove streetcars, delivered mail, and served on police forces. In every country, women worked in munitions factories, often under dangerous conditions. Freed from the home, women also asserted their independence by smoking in public, bobbing their hair, and wearing trousers.

For the people at home, the misery of wartime was compounded by the stress of missing loved ones. Many only hoped that their husbands and sons would return home alive. This British soldier was killed by a stray bullet during the Christmas Armistice of 1914.

Women also served with great valor on the battlefield in the ambulance and medical corps. This wartime service persuaded many British lawmakers after the war to grant women (over 30) the right to vote. Germany and Austria passed similar laws after the war ended.

Governments also expanded their police powers. Liberals shuddered when the British Parliament passed the Defense of the Realm Act, which allowed the government to censor or shut down newspapers. It even became illegal for paintings to depict dead British soldiers. In Germany, the Auxiliary Service Law forced able-bodied males to work in defense-related jobs. It also hastened the introduction of women into mines and munitions factories. German children, under the direction of their teachers, contributed by forming “garbage brigades” that searched for anything remotely usable for the war effort.

Europeans everywhere faced shortages of clothing, coal, meat, and staples like tea and sugar. The elderly were especially affected by shortages, as their fixed incomes prevented them from affording goods that were not affected by government price controls. Terrible food shortages hit Germany and Russia especially hard. British blockades created food shortages in Germany. The Germans retaliated by sinking British ships, including the ocean liner, Lusitania.

Women made up over 40% of the French workforce during the war. Their contributions led many countries to grant women the right to vote once the war ended.

The food shortages in Russia helped to trigger the Russian Revolution. As Tsar Nicholas holed up in his palace watching his country fall apart, crops rotted in the fields, the Russian rationing system broke down, and people starved.

Veterans returning to the home front did not receive the cheers they had on their way to the battlefront. In his poem "Disabled," Wilfred Owen describes a wheelchair-bound Scottish soldier, who after being "drafted out with drums and cheers" returned home to less enthusiastic crowds. Owen, who also wrote the famous poem "Dulce et Decorum Est," was hospitalized with battle wounds in 1917, only to return to battle and die in the trenches a week before the November 1918 armistice.