"1914" begins suddenly, with a stark declaration: "War broke." The title indicates the specific war in question: World War I, which began in mid-1914 following the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand of Austria.
But "1914" doesn't get into too many historical details about the war. Rather, the unidentified speaker (who seems to be speaking during the year 1914, sometime shortly after the outbreak of war) is concerned with the war's general destructiveness and horror. In a striking metaphor, the speaker compares the war to the "Winter of the world," a human season of cold, death, and destruction that "closes in" threateningly on the poem's present. These first two lines present the war as a brutal, unavoidable fact. Now that war has begun (no matter how it began), it seems inevitable that the situation will get worse before it gets better, if it gets better at all.
The poem's beginning is all the more striking thanks to several poetic devices. Just listen to all the repeated sounds in these first two lines:
War broke: and now the Winter of the world
With perishing great darkness closes in.
Alliteration and consonance give the lines an intense, dramatic effect. Assertive, punchy stresses on "War broke" and "great darkness" reflect the destructive, violent force the lines describe. And the colon after the poem's first two words creates a dramatic division in the first line, called a caesura, which breaks the line itself in two. War "broke" out (in the sense that it began), but it also "broke" this line of poetry, just as it destroys human lives and uproots whole societies. The full extent of war's destruction—as well as the possibility for repairing the damage—will be the central preoccupations of the rest of the poem.