Catastrophe : Europe Goes to War 1914

The Amazon Historical past E book of the Yr 2013 is a magisterial chronicle of the calamity that befell Europe in 1914 because the continent shifted from the glamour of the Edwardian period to the tragedy of complete warfare.

In 1914, Europe plunged into the 20th century’s first horrible act of self-immolation – what was then referred to as The Nice Struggle. On the eve of its centenary, Max Hastings seeks to clarify each how the battle happened and what befell tens of millions of women and men in the course of the first months of strife.

He finds the proof overwhelming, that Austria and Germany should settle for principal blame for the outbreak. Whereas what adopted was an enormous tragedy, he argues passionately in opposition to the `poets’ view’, that the warfare was not price profitable. It was very important to the liberty of Europe, he says, that the Kaiser’s Germany ought to be defeated.

His narrative of the early battles will astonish these whose photos of the warfare are merely of mud, wire, trenches and metal helmets. Hastings describes how the French Military marched into motion amid virgin rural landscapes, in uniforms of purple and blue, led by mounted officers, with flags flying and bands enjoying. The bloodiest day of all the Western warfare fell on 22 August 1914, when the French misplaced 27,000 lifeless. 4 days later, at Le Cateau the British fought a unprecedented motion in opposition to the oncoming Germans, one of many final of its sort in historical past. In October, at horrible value they held the allied line in opposition to huge German assaults within the first battle of Ypres.The writer additionally describes the brutal struggles in Serbia, East Prussia and Galicia, the place by Christmas the Germans, Austrians, Russians and Serbs had inflicted on one another three million casualties.

This e-book gives solutions to the large and engaging query `what occurred to Europe in 1914?’, by means of Max Hastings’s accustomed mix of top-down and bottom-up accounts from a mess of statesmen and generals, peasants, housewives and personal troopers of seven nations. His narrative pricks myths and gives some hanging and controversial judgements. For a number of readers gripped by the writer’s final worldwide best-seller `All Hell Let Free’, this may appear a worthy successor.