World’s Story Volume XV: The World War

This volume captures the First World War as only a contemporary historian could: with the visceral awareness that civilization had fundamentally broken. Dresser, writing in the war's immediate aftermath, traces the diplomatic failures and imperial tensions that ignited the conflict, then moves through the brutal arithmetic of trench warfare, the industrial slaughter of new weapons, and the political machinations that kept the fighting grinding forward. What distinguishes this account is its dual perspective: both the granular detail of specific battles and campaigns, and the broader reckoning with what the war revealed about modern society. The final chapters grapple with the war's staggering human and economic cost, written by someone who understood that the world before 1914 had ceased to exist. For readers seeking to understand how the first generation to witness industrialized war processed its horror, this volume serves as both historical record and cultural artifact.