14-18: Understanding the Great War

With this brilliantly innovative book, reissued for the 100th anniversary of the beginning of World War I, Stéphane Audoin-Rouzeau and Annette Becker have shown that the Great War was the matrix on which all subsequent disasters of the twentieth century were formed.

Three elements of the conflict, all too often neglected or denied, are identified as those that must be grasped if we are to understand the war: First, what inspired its unprecedented physical brutality, and what were the effect...