This second volume begins with the Battle of Verdun, the longest battle of the Great War and one of the most terrible ever fought. By the beginning of 1916 the French had already suffered 2 million casualties. Russia was crippled. Von Falkenhayn now believed ‘The forces of France will bleed to death.’

Through the unimaginable horrors of the Somme, the entry of the US into the war and the ‘final throw of the dice’, the spring 1918 Kaiserslacht, G. J. Meyer marshals the evidence brilliantly to show why the General was wrong. Much of the agony is in the detail: after the Armistice, while the victors debated the new world order, perhaps a quarter of a million German civilians, many of them children, died of starvation and disease under a pointless naval blockade.

• Published in the US by Random House, not previously published in the UK.
• An account of the First World War acclaimed as accessible and vivid.
• Published for Armistice in the last year of the conflict's anniversary.
• Volume 2 of a sweeping two-volume history, with volume 1 published earlier in the year.