**NATIONAL BESTSELLER - The definitive account of the Great War from one
of our most eminent military historians. "Elegantly written, clear,
detailed, and omniscient.... Keegan is...perhaps the best military
historian of our day." --*The New York Times Book Review
*
*The First World War created the modern world. A conflict of
unprecedented ferocity, it abruptly ended the relative peace and
prosperity of the Victorian era, unleashing such demons of the twentieth
century as mechanized warfare and mass death. It also helped to usher in
the ideas that have shaped our times--modernism in the arts, new
approaches to psychology and medicine, radical thoughts about economics
and society--and in so doing shattered the faith in rationalism and
liberalism that had prevailed in Europe since the Enlightenment.
*
The First World War probes the mystery of how a civilization at the
height of its achievement could have propelled itself into such a
ruinous conflict and takes us behind the scenes of the negotiations
among Europe's crowned heads (all of them related to one another by
blood) and ministers, and their doomed efforts to defuse the crisis.
Keegan reveals how, by an astonishing failure of diplomacy and
communication, a bilateral dispute grew to engulf an entire continent.
But the heart of Keegan's superb narrative is, of course, his analysis
of the military conflict. With unequalled authority and insight, he
recreates the nightmarish engagements whose names have become
legend--Verdun, the Somme and Gallipoli among them--and sheds new light
on the strategies and tactics employed, particularly the contributions
of geography and technology. No less central to Keegan's account is the
human aspect. He acquaints us with the thoughts of the intriguing
personalities who oversaw the tragically unnecessary catastrophe--from
heads of state like Russia's hapless tsar, Nicholas II, to renowned
warmakers such as Haig, Hindenburg and Joffre. But Keegan reserves his
most affecting personal sympathy for those whose individual efforts
history has not recorded--"the anonymous millions, indistinguishably
drab, undifferentially deprived of any scrap of the glories that by
tradition made the life of the man-at-arms tolerable."
By the end of the war, three great empires--the Austro-Hungarian, the
Russian and the Ottoman--had collapsed. But as Keegan shows, the
devastation ex-tended over the entirety of Europe, and still profoundly
informs the politics and culture of the continent today. His brilliant,
panoramic account of this vast and terrible conflict is destined to take
its place among the classics of world history.
