The definitive story of the Great War, the war that created the modern world, unleashing the terrors of mechanized warfare and mass death, and establishing the political fault lines that imperil European stability to this day. Keegan takes us behind the scenes of the doomed diplomatic efforts to avert the catastrophe; he probes the haunting question of how a civilization at the height of its cultural achievement and prosperity could propel itself toward ruin with so little provocation; his panoramic narrative brings to life the nightmarish engagements whose names have become legend - Verdun, the Somme, Gallipoli - as with profound sympathy, he explores the minds of Joffe, Haig and Hindenburg, the famed generals who directed the cataclysm.

The battle of Verdun lasted ten months. It was a battle in which at least 700,000 men fell, along a front of fifteen miles; the battle whose aim was less to defeat the enemy than bleed him to death; the battleground whose once fertile terrain even now resembles a haunted wilderness, battered and crumbling.

This book is more than a chronicle of the facts of battle. It is a profoundly moving, sympathetic study of the men who fought there, and show that Verdun is a key to understanding the First World War - a key to the minds of those who waged it, to the traditions that bound them, and to the world that gave them the opportunity. Continuously in print for over thirty years, this unabridged edition contains a new preface and additional photographs.

Poilu: The World War I Notebooks of Corporal Louis Barthas, Barrelmaker, 1914-1918

Along with millions of other Frenchmen, Louis Barthas, a thirty-five-year-old barrelmaker from a small wine-growing town, was conscripted to fight the Germans in the opening days of the first world war. Corporal Barthas spent the next four years in near-ceaseless combat, wherever the French army fought its fiercest battles: Artois, Flanders, Champagne, Verdun, the Somme, the Argonne. Barthas’ riveting wartime narrative, first published in France in 1978, presents the vivid, immediate experiences of a frontline soldier.