It is almost a century since the countdown to the First World War began, ominously enough, with a series of linked crises in the Balkans. Ten years hence publishers will start planning their first centennial histories. But apart from a gap in the 1940s and 1950s when the Second World War took priority, the flow of studies has barely ceased since 1918. Understandably: For Europeans, the war was uniquely horrifying both in its course and its consequences. In spite of the global title later bestowed on it, this was essentially a European war, and for two generations of Europeans it was simply the "Great War", tout court. Like earlier European wars it involved battles on and beyond the seas, but it was fought out on European territory and--apart from the brief but substantial American intervention in its final weeks--by European armies.
Above all it was for European peoples that the consequences were most devastating. Some thirteen million people died, nine million of them young men, most of them in conditions of almost unimaginable horror; the British in the mud of the Somme and Passchendaele, the French and Germans pounding each other to smithereens at Verdun, the Austrians and Hungarians freezing to death in the Carpathians, the Russians driven forward like cattle on the plains of Poland, the Italians slaughtered in their vain and repeated attacks on the rocky slopes of the Carso.
