In the summer of 1914 Europe’s great powers had not fought each other for forty-three years. Five weeks after a wrong turn in Sarajevo, all of them were at war — dragged by alliance mechanics, mobilization timetables and the conviction, on every side, that it would be short. It lasted fifty-one months, dug a trench from the sea to Switzerland, drew in soldiers and laborers from every inhabited continent, and killed around twenty million people. Four empires that began the war did not survive it.
Twelve chapters follow the war from the July Crisis to the treaty that failed to end it — watch the fronts crawl, the arrows break against them, and the map of 1919 assemble itself out of the wreckage. Scrub the timeline, interrogate any country, and sit the Field Exam when you can read a situation map the way the general staffs did — and see what they could not.
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