Thirteen Days

The blame imposed by the Allied powers on Germany in 1919 not only led to the Second World War, but was fundamentally unjust, argues Clive Ponting in this examination of the days that led up to the start of war in 1914 - a war that nobody wanted. France and Britain were both at fault, but above all the nationalist movement in Serbia, the moribund empire of Austria-Hungary, and Russia's expansionist ideals in the Balkans were the chief culprits. This intensive study of that crucial fortnight puts events in an entirely different light. Even when war began, all sides showed reluctance to come out and actually fight. Countless millions died in the four miserable years that followed, years when tanks and poison gas both became weapons of war for the first time. They were also to prove the end of three immense empires: Germany, Russia and Austria-Hungary. Nine million fighting men lay dead at the end of it, and more than double that number of civilians. The world had never seen a self-inflicted disaster of that magnitude, and the immediate causes of this world-changing catastrophe - overwhelmed, as it has since become, by the hideous melodrama of the Second World War - have never been satisfactorily explained. But now, in a narrative that is nothing short of brilliant, the eminent historian Ponting examines and exposes the Gordian knot of aristocratic attitude, military posturing, ghastly mistakes and fatal misjudgments that led up to 'the war to end all wars'. Except that it wasn't. When it was all over, the French Premier Clemenceau prophetically observed: 'This is not peace, it is a twenty-year truce.' And how right he was. (Kirkus UK)