Captain Alfred Shout, posthumous Australian winner of the Victoria Cross, Gallipoli.
World War I was limited in time and space, lasting only four years. Its outcome was determined in a single region—northern France and Flanders. Yet its unprecedented scale and cost created a spectrum of consequences, earning it another name: the Great War. That war was a Great Surprise. It was expected to be decisive and short. Instead it drew the entire world into an attritional death grapple whose outcome was uncertain until the end, and whose graves are scattered from Nova Scotia to Singapore. The Great War marked the end of European hegemony, the rise of the US and the Soviet Union as superpowers, and the emergence of the non-Western world on its terms. This conflict truly was the defining event of the twentieth century.
For all its impact, World War I remains shrouded in myth, mystery, and mourning. It exists as a series of disjointed images: old photographs and fragments of poems; devastated landscapes; anonymous soldiers scrambling over the top; above all, the endless cemeteries of the Western Front. The History of World War I returns that tragic conflict to the sphere of history. Based on a half-century of sophisticated research, incorporating state-of-the-art graphics, the six volumes of the series present the war on land, at sea, and in the air in a global context, and in human terms.
Dennis Showalter