The Peace That Failed

EPILOGUE · 1919 AND AFTER · The Great War, 1914–1918

This is the new map: a dozen states where four empires stood — Finland to Yugoslavia, a reborn Poland after 123 years of partition — drawn in a Paris conference hall by exhausted victors, on Wilson’s promise of “self-determination” applied to a continent where peoples do not live in neat blocks. The result: some 25–30 million Europeans become national minorities inside someone else’s nation-state — three million Germans in Czechoslovakia, three million Hungarians outside Hungary (Trianon leaves Hungary a third of its old territory; no country on this map remembers 1920 more bitterly), Germans

The turn: The Hall of Mirrors, 28 June 1919.

This chapter is one scene of an interactive atlas: the map repaints as the dates advance, campaigns draw themselves, and every chapter argues its causes and consequences — then a field exam asks you to prove it on the map.