The Storm of 1914

In the summer of 1914 two gunshots in a Balkan street set in motion a catastrophe that no statesman could halt. Within weeks the great powers of Europe, bound by alliances and driven by railway timetables and the cult of the offensive, marched their peoples into the deadliest war the world had yet seen.

In one sweeping, authoritative volume, E.B Cohen tells the whole story: the long road to war and the July Crisis; the failure of the Schlieffen Plan at the Marne; the descent into the trenches and the slaughter of Verdun, the Somme, and Passchendaele; the war beyond the Western Front — Gallipoli, the Eastern Front, the Middle East, Italy, Africa, the war at sea and in the air; the home fronts, the women, the propaganda, and the fraying of endurance; the Russian Revolutions and America's entry; and the final hundred days, the Armistice, and the flawed peace that carried the seeds of the next war.

Sober, vivid, and grounded in the historical record, with portraits of the monarchs, statesmen, and generals and the voices of the men in the trenches, this is a sweeping single-volume history of the Great War — a book that gives equal weight to every front and to the human beings caught in the storm.