World War I

World War One began on horseback, with generals employing bayonet charges to gain ground, and ended with attacks resembling the Nazi blitzkriegs. The scale of devastation was unlike anything the world had seen before: Fourteen million combatants died, a further twenty million were wounded, and four empires were destroyed. Even the victors' empires were fatally damaged. An overwhelming disaster from which the world is still recovering, World War One can seem baffling in its complexity. But now Norman Stone has composed a succinct history of the conflict. --from publisher description.