This remarkable account tells the story of how, in its first two years, the First World War reduced Europe's mightiest empires to rubble, and cracked the foundations of the world. On a summer day in 1914, a nineteen-year-old Serbian nationalist gunned down Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo. In less than a month, a combination of ambition, deceit, fear, jealousy, missed opportunities and miscalculation sent Austro-Hungarian troops marching into Serbia, German troops streaming toward Paris, and a vast Russian army into war, with Britain as her ally. No one could guess what lay ahead: years of slaughter, physical and moral exhaustion, and the near collapse of a civilization that until that moment had dominated the globe.