The War That Ended Peace – How Europe Abandoned Peace For The First World War by Margaret Macmillan
A BALANCED and detailed look at how the 1914-18 conflict, or the Great War, came about. The war itself, with its 8.5 million dead, is dealt with in the epilogue of the 600-page book, the rest of the volume is taken up with the numerous causes.
Macmillan deftly sifts through an enormous amount of research sources to produce a riveting, yet unsensational, history of the decades leading up to the outbreak of war.
She points to the unhealthy degree of growing militarization in the various countries involved in the war, particularly Germany, and how this overtook any willingness to reach diplomatic solutions which had defused previous crises between the nations.
Macmillan, Professor of International History at Oxford University, brings out the complex sequence of events leading from a single assassination – that of heir to the Austria-Hungary throne, Franz Ferdinand – to the disastrous First World War a few weeks later.
