The First World War

A Complete History

Martin Gilbert

• Publisher: RosettaBooks
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9780795337239
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire du 20ème siècle

"A stunning achievement of research and storytelling" that weaves together the major fronts of WWI into a single, sweeping narrative ( Publishers Weekly, starred review).
 
It was to be the war to end all wars, and it began at 11:15 on the morning of June 28, 1914, in an outpost of the Austro-Hungarian Empire called Sarajevo. It would officially end nearly five years later. Unofficially, however, it has never ended: Many of the horrors we live with today are rooted in the First World War.
 
The Great War left millions of civilians and soldiers maimed or dead. It also saw the creation of new technologies of destruction: tanks, planes, and submarines; machine guns and field artillery; poison gas and chemical warfare. It introduced U-boat packs and strategic bombing, unrestricted war on civilians and mistreatment of prisoners. But the war changed our world in far more fundamental ways than these.
 
In its wake, empires toppled, monarchies fell, and whole populations lost their national identities. As political systems and geographic boundaries were realigned, the social order shifted seismically. Manners and cultural norms; literature and the arts; education and class distinctions; all underwent a vast sea change.
 
As historian Martin Gilbert demonstrates in this "majestic opus" of historical synthesis, the twentieth century can be said to have been born on that fateful morning in June of 1914 ( Publishers Weekly, starred review).
 
"One of the first books that anyone should read . . . to try to understand this war and this century." — The New York Times Book Review
 

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of maps
• Introduction
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Prelude to war
• 2. ‘Wild with joy’
• 3. The opening struggle
• 4. From Mons to the Marne
• 5. Digging in: the start of trench warfare
• 6. Towards the first Christmas: ‘mud and slime and vermin’
• 7. Stalemate and the search for breakthroughs
• 8. The Gallipoli landings
• 9. The Entente in danger
• 10. The Central Powers in the ascendant
• 11. The continuing failure of the Entente
• 12. ‘This war will end at Verdun’
• 13. ‘Europe is mad. The world is mad.’
• 14. The Battle of the Somme: ‘It is going to be a bloody holocaust’
• 15. War on every front
• 16. The intensification of the war
• 17. War, desertion, mutiny
• 18. Stalemate in the west, turmoil in the east
• 19. Battle at Passchendaele; Revolution in Russia
• 20. The terms of war and peace
• 21. The Central Powers on the verge of triumph
• 22. Germany’s last great onslaught
• 23. ‘The battle, the battle, nothing else counts’
• 24. The Allied counter-attack
• 25. The turn of the tide
• 26. The collapse of the Central Powers
• 27. The final armistice
• 28. Peacemaking and remembrance
• 29. ‘… to the memory of that great company’
• Bibliography
• Maps
• Index
• Endnotes