The Great War, 1914-1918: A pictorial history

At the time of publication the Great War, after a lapse of fifty years, had passed into history. This was the war which, in Kaiser Wilhelm's words, was to be over "before the leaves fall" but which instead blew into a holocaust that blazed from 1914 to 1918 and drew into its fiery center the United States and all the nations of Europe except Spain and Scandinavia. During its course, even at a cautious estimate, more than twelve million lives were destroyed on the battlefields, beneath the oceans, in hospitals, by madness and disease. Even if inevitable, even if, in Ambassador Herrick's words, "it had to come," this was the greatest, most senseless tragedy of its time. From the somber records of all the warring nations, from thousands of photographs in public collections and from his own personal collection, John Terraine selected some three hundred as the illustrations for this volume, "unquestionably the finest pictorial study of the Great War yet published." They were chosen with a deep sense of the horror, the heroism, the occasional grandeur of events as they evolved and of the personal involvement of the men and women whose faces look out at us from the pages. This is the war as it must have been. Here are the actors great and small -- the young recruits, the professional soldiers, the statesmen, the civilians, the generals, the women, not all of whom stayed at home and waited. Here too are the cities, the battlefields, the ship and the armies. As accompaniment to the pictures, each with its own explanatory caption, John Terraine has written a text that can stand in its own right as a brillian comprehensive narrative of the long, dark passage from Sarajevo to the Armistice. It was written in the same spirit in which the pictures were chosen, under the same compulsion to point out the fatal consequences of militarism and the inadequacies of statesmen.