The Story of the First World War, Volume 1 + 2

1.Into The Abyss: The Story of the First World War, Volume One

Publisher Amberley Publishing
Published 15th June 2018
Pages 416

2.The Fate of Nations The Story of the First World War, Volume Two Paperback 

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Amberley Publishing (15 Nov. 2018)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 432 pages
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 23.4 x 3.2 x 15.7 c

Stare: de colectie

This remarkable account tells the story of how, in its first two years, the First World War reduced Europe's mightiest empires to rubble, and cracked the foundations of the world.

On a summer day in 1914, a nineteen-year-old Serbian nationalist gunned down Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo. In less than a month, a combination of ambition, deceit, fear, jealousy, missed opportunities and miscalculation sent Austro-Hungarian troops marching into Serbia, German troops streaming toward Paris, and a vast Russian army into war, with Britain as her ally.

No one could guess what lay ahead: years of slaughter, physical and moral exhaustion, and the near collapse of a civilization that until that moment had dominated the globe.

This second volume begins with the Battle of Verdun, the longest battle of the Great War and one of the most terrible ever fought. By the beginning of 1916 the French had already suffered 2 million casualties. Russia was crippled. Von Falkenhayn now believed ‘The forces of France will bleed to death.’ Through the unimaginable horrors of the Somme, the entry of the US into the war and the ‘final throw of the dice’, the spring 1918 Kaiserslacht, G. J. Meyer marshals the evidence brilliantly to show why the General was wrong. Much of the agony is in the detail: after the Armistice, while the victors debated the new world order, perhaps a quarter of a million German civilians, many of them children, died of starvation and disease under a pointless naval blockade.