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Although most informed observers anticipated a short war, the First World War lasted more than four years. European armies were expected to engage in military manoeuvres, without significant costs for civilians. This vision quickly evaporated. Civilians no less than military personnel experienced war as displacement, partly because ofthe eruption offighting across large swathes of territory on the European mainland, with a resulting flight of populations, but also because the fraught conditions of prolonged war disposed states to engage in the mass deportation of civilians who were believed to threaten military freedom of manoeuvre and to undermine the war effort more broadly. These crucibles of displacement stretched from Belgium to Armenia, taking in France, Italy, Austria-Hungary, the Russian empire and Serbia. The German occupation of Belgium, Poland and Lithuania provoked the flight of civilians on a …