Catastrophe: Europe Goes to War 1914: Europe Goes to War 1914

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The Amazon History Book of the Year 2013 is a magisterial chronicle of the calamity that befell Europe in 1914 as the continent shifted from the glamour of the Edwardian era to the tragedy of total war.

In 1914, Europe plunged into the 20th century’s first terrible act of self-immolation – what was then called The Great War. On the eve of its centenary, Max Hastings seeks to explain both how the conflict came about and what befell millions of men and women during the first months of strife.

He finds the evidence overwhelming, that Austria and Germany must accept principal blame for the outbreak. While what followed was a vast tragedy, he argues passionately against the ‘poets’ view’, that the war was not worth winning. It was vital to the freedom of Europe, he says, that the Kaiser’s Germany should be defeated.

His narrative of the early battles will astonish those whose images of the war are simply of mud, wire, trenches and steel helmets. Hastings describes how the French Army marched into action amid virgin rural landscapes, in uniforms of red and blue, led by mounted officers, with flags flying and bands playing. The bloodiest day of the entire Western war fell on 22 August 1914, when the French lost 27,000 dead. Four days later, at Le Cateau the British fought an extraordinary action against the oncoming Germans, one of the last of its kind in history. In October, at terrible cost they held the allied line against massive German assaults in the first battle of Ypres.The author also describes the brutal struggles in Serbia, East Prussia and Galicia, where by Christmas the Germans, Austrians, Russians and Serbs had inflicted on each other three million casualties.

This book offers answers to the huge and fascinating question ‘what happened to Europe in 1914?’, through Max Hastings’s accustomed blend of top-down and bottom-up accounts from a multitude of statesmen and generals, peasants, housewives and private soldiers of seven nations. His narrative pricks myths and offers some striking and controversial judgements. For a host of readers gripped by the author’s last international best-seller ‘All Hell Let Loose’, this will seem a worthy successor.

  • Publisher: ‎William Collins
  • Language: English
  • Paperback
  • 672 pages
  • ISBN-10: 0007519745
  • ISBN-13:  978-0007519743
  • Dimensions:‎  12.9 x 4.3 x 19.8 cm

About the author

Max Hastings is the author of twenty-seven books, most of them about war. Born in London in 1945, he attended University College, Oxford before becoming a journalist. In 1967 he was a World Press Institute Fellow in the United States, then stayed to report the 1968 US election. Thereafter he worked as a reporter for BBC TV and British newspapers, covering eleven conflicts including Vietnam, the 1973 Yom Kippur war and the 1982 South Atlantic war. His first major book was BOMBER COMMAND, published in Britain and the US in 1979. He has since authored such works as VIETNAM, CATASTROPHE, ARMAGEDDON, RETRIBUTION, WINSTON'S WAR, THE KOREAN WAR AND INFERNO. Between 1986 and 2002 he served as editor-in-chief of the British Daily Telegraph, then editor of the London Evening Standard. He has won many awards both for his books and his journalism, including the 2012 $100,000 Pritzker Library prize for lifetime achievement, and the 2019 Bronze Arthur Ross medal of the US Council For Foreign Relations for VIETNAM. He lives in Berkshire, UK, with his wife Penny and has two grown-up children, Charlotte and Harry. Max says: 'I am lucky enough to have been able to earn my living doing the things I love most: travelling and hearing incredible stories from people all over the world, then writing about their experiences in war, when mankind is at both its best and worst'. Among the scariest moments of his career as a war correspondent, he cites following the embattled Israeli army on the Golan Heights in October 1973, and reporting the last weeks in Vietnam in 1975, before flying out of the US Embassy compound in its final evacuation.

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