A Short History of the Great War

Written in the shadow of the trenches, A.F. Pollard's 1920 account offers something rare: history witnessed while the smoke still hung over Europe. Pollard, a founding figure at the Institute of Historical Research, traces the war's origins not to a single assassination in Sarajevo but to the rotting architecture of empire, alliance, and arms that had been building for decades. He maps the fatal web connecting Vienna to Berlin, St. Petersburg to Paris, showing how nationalism, imperial ambition, and military doctrine locked the continent into a course no single leader could reverse. The book moves from the July Crisis through the major campaigns, always returning to the political currents beneath the battlefield movements. Pollard writes with the urgency of a man who knew many of these actors personally and who understood that how the war was remembered would shape the peace that followed. For readers seeking to understand how the Great War began not as an explosion but as an inevitable collapse, Pollard's contemporary voice remains indispensable.