The War That Ended Peace: The Road to 1914

"Cry 'Havoc' and let slip the dogs of war" FictionFan As a Brit, studying the First World War at school in the seventies, memories of the Second World War were still fresh and bitter enough amongst parents and teachers that there was never really a question that the Germans were the 'bad guys' in both wars while we (the Brits, primarily, though a little bit of credit was occasionally given to the Allies) were the k. "Extraordinary piece of research, but ………….reader beware." according to Antonio Vives. What follows is not meant as a criticism of the book, which is an extraordinary piece of research, monumental in scope and deep in knowledge, making very clear why peace ended. The immersion of the author into the events and the level of details are astonishing. This review is meant to warn the reader of the efforts necessary to take full advantage of the book.T. MacMillan tells us how WWI happened, but is short on telling us why Stanley T. Myles I loved MacMillan's "Paris 1919" but I'm not so thrilled with "The War That Ended Peace." As in the earlier work, MacMillan provides voluminous detail on the events leading to war in 1914, but much of the material covers familiar ground, and in my opinion not as well as "The Sleepwalkers," the other recent review of the road to WWI. For me, what is missing is an

With indelible portraits, MacMillan shows how the fateful decisions of a few powerful people changed the course of history. Taut, suspenseful, and impossible to put down, The War That Ended Peace is also a wise cautionary reminder of how wars happen in spite of the near-universal desire to keep the peace. The century since the end of the Napoleonic wars had been the most peaceful era Europe had known since the fall of the Roman Empire. Here too we meet the urbane and cosmopolitan Count Harry Kessler, who noticed many of the early signs that something was stirring in Europe; the young Winston Churchill, then First Lord of the Admiralty and a rising figure in British politics; Madame Caillaux, who shot a man who might have been a force for peace; and more. Destined to become a classic in the tradition of Barbara Tuchman's The Guns of August, The War That Ended Peace enriches our understanding of one of the defining periods and events of the twentieth century.. In the first years of the twentieth century, Europe believed it was marching to a golden, happy, and prosperous future. But instead, complex personalities and rivalries, colonialism and ethnic nationalisms,