The Assault: Germany Before the Outbreak and England in War-Time

An American journalist's electrifying firsthand account of Europe in the years before the Great War and England under bombardment. Floyd Martin Wile, who spent years working in Berlin and London, offers an outsider's invaluable perspective on a continent sleepwalking toward catastrophe. He documents the atmosphere of militarism spreading through German society, the mounting tensions between nations, and the strange complacency that characterized European diplomacy in the years leading to 1914. The book shifts to wartime England, where Wile witnessed a nation transformed by conflict, its people steeled for a struggle none had imagined possible. This is not a military history or diplomatic chronicle, but something rarer and more valuable: the visceral, day-to-day observations of a journalist embedded in the very cities that would soon become symbols of the war's horror. Wile's account endures because it captures what textbooks cannot the texture of ordinary life in extraordinary times, the rumors and fears and false confidences of people who did not yet know what was coming.