The well-respected historian Manfried Rauchensteiner analyses the outbreak of World War I, Emperor Franz Josephs role in the conflict, and how the various nationalities of the Habsburg Monarchy reacted to the disintegration of this 640-yearold empire in 1918. After Archduke Franz Ferdinand"s assassination in Sarajevo in 1914, war was inevitable. Emperor Franz Joseph intended it, and everyone in Vienna expected it. How the war began and how Austria-Hungary managed to avoid capitulation only weeks later with the help of German troops reads like a thriller. Manfried Rauchensteiner"s book is based on decades of research and is a fascinating read to the very end, even though the final outcome, the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Dual Monarchy, is already known. Originally published in German in 2013 by Bohlau, this standard work is now available in English.

Women on the Land tells the remarkable story of womens contribution to agriculture and forestry during the two World Wars. It traces the formation and history of the Womens Land Army, and shows how women, mostly untrained and from non-farming backgrounds, helped maintain food production for a beleaguered nation, by filling the places of men away at the war. At the height of the First World War the Land Army had a full-time membership of 23,000 members, a number that was to exceed 80,000 during the Second World War. The book pays tribute to women like Lady Denman, who administered the Land Army during the Second World War and who was its chief inspiration and driving force, and also outlines the part played by other womens groups in wartime. Containing many first-hand reminiscences by the women who served, and a number of evocative illustrations, Women on the Land highlights the years when women were effectively to challenge long-established preconceptions as to what properly constituted womens work.

Women on the Land tells the remarkable story of womens contribution to agriculture and forestry during the two World Wars. It traces the formation and history of the Womens Land Army, and shows how women, mostly untrained and from non-farming backgrounds, helped maintain food production for a beleaguered nation, by filling the places of men away at the war. At the height of the First World War the Land Army had a full-time membership of 23,000 members, a number that was to exceed 80,000 during the Second World War. The book pays tribute to women like Lady Denman, who administered the Land Army during the Second World War and who was its chief inspiration and driving force, and also outlines the part played by other womens groups in wartime. Containing many first-hand reminiscences by the women who served, and a number of evocative illustrations, Women on the Land highlights the years when women were effectively to challenge long-established preconceptions as to what properly constituted womens work.

The First World War massively changed the scale and nature of the "military veteran question" in Europe. The enormous impact of mass deaths and destruction, the demise of old empires, and the rise of new nation states resulting from total war made the fate of ex-soldiers into a key issue that shaped all societies in interwar Europe. The unprecedented number of combatants, together with the severity and frequency of injuries incurred in industrialized warfare, meant that the relationship between ex-soldiers and the state became a crucial issue for all governments, raising major questions about welfare provisions, social policy, party politics and national memory cultures. While there has been much recent research on war veterans in Germany and other European countries, other regions of Central and East-Central Europe have attracted noticeably less attention. For this reason, this special issue presents research on the comparative history of World War One veterans in Austria and Czechoslovakia. This transnational investigation breaks new ground by investigating two neighbouring states that showed distinct patterns of immediate post-war reconstruction, as well as of subsequent development.

El relato definitivo de las fuerzas políticas, culturales, militares y personales que llevaron a Europa hacia la Gran Guerra.La Primera Guerra Mundial puso fin a un largo periodo de paz sostenida en Europa: una epoca en la que se hablaba confiadamente de prosperidad, de progreso y de esperanza. Y sin embargo, en 1914 el continente se lanzo de cabeza a un conflicto catastrofico, que mato a millones de personas, desangro las economias nacionales, derrumbo imperios y puso fin para siempre a la hegemonia mundial europea. Fue una guerra que hubiera podido evitarse hasta el ultimo momento. La pregunta es: ¿por que se produjo?Empezando en el siglo xix y acabando con el asesinatodel archiduque Francisco Fernando, la gran historiadora Margaret MacMillan desvela la compleja red de alianzas, cambios politicos y tecnologicos, decisiones diplomaticas y, sobre todo, personalidades y debilidades humanas que llevaron a Europa al desastre.Una narracion imprescindible para conocer el mundo de hoy entendiendo mejor el de hace un siglo.

On 7 August 1914 a French corps attacked towards Mulhouse in Alsace and was immediately thrown back by the Germans. On 14 August, two weeks before Tannenberg and three weeks before the Battle of the Marne, the French 1st and 2nd Armies attacked into Lorraine, and on 20 August the German 6th and 7th Armies counterattacked. After forty-three years of peace, this was the first test of strength between France and Germany. In 1929, Karl Deuringer wrote the official history of the battle for the Bavarian Army, an immensely detailed work of 890 pages, chronicling the battle to 15 September. Here, First World War expert and former army officer Terence Zuber has translated and edited this study to a more accessible length, while retaining over thirty highly detailed maps, to bring us the first account in English of the first major battle of the Great War.

Flying at 18, demobbed at 20, Semples astonishing experience has been meticulously put into context. How do you fly a Handley Page across France in total darkness? The answer is the Lighthouse system, just one of the revelations in this unique record of ingenuity and courage.

From 1917 British soldiers who were unfit or too old for front-line service were to serve unarmed and within the range of German guns for weeks or even months at a time undertaking labouring tasks. Both at the time and since they have arguably not been given the recognition they deserve for this difficult and dangerous work.From non-existence in 1914, by November 1918 Military Labour had developed into an organised and efficient 350,000-strong Labour Corps, supported by Dominion and foreign labour of more than a million men. Following the war, the grim and solemn tasks of clearing battlefields and constructing cemeteries, which continued until 1921, were also the responsibility of the Corps.Here, John Starling and Ivor Lee bring together extensive research from both primary and secondary sources to reveal how the vital, yet largely unreported, role played by these brave soldiers was crucial to achieving victory in 1918.

Imagine stepping into someone elses shoes. Walking back in time a century ago, which shoes would they be? A pair of silk sensations costing thousands of pounds designed by Yanturni of Paris, or wooden clogs with metal cleats that spark on the cobbles of a factory yard? Would your shoes be heavy with mud from trudging along duckboards between the tents of a front-line hospital or stuck with tufts of turf from a football pitch? Would you be cloaked in green and purple, brandishing a Votes for Women banner, or would you be respectably dressed, restricted by your thigh-length corset?Great War Fashion opens the wardrobe of women in the years before the outbreak of war to explore the real woman behind the stiff, mono-bosomed ideal of Edwardian society, and closes it on a new breed of women who have donned trousers and overalls to feed the nation and work in munitions factories and who, clad in mourning, have loved and lost a whole generation of men.The journey through Great War Fashion is not just about the changing clothes and fashions of the war years it is a journey into the lives of the women who lived under the shadow of war and were irrevocably changed by it. Using material from her own extensive collection, renowned costume expert Lucy Adlington brings an inspiring generation of women to life with rare and stunning images alongside a narrative that is both deeply poignant and laugh-out-loud funny.

The Battle of the Aisne fought in September 1914 introduced a new and savage mode of warfare to the soldiers of the British Expeditionary Force, their French allies and to the German Army. Both officers and men were trained to fight mobile wars. When they reached the north bank of the Aisne, the Old Contemptibles would be stopped by the Germans entrenched on high ground, armed with machine guns and supported by heavy artillery. The British commanders would naively send their troops on futile assaults up slopes devoid of cover to attack the German lines dug in on the ridges along the Chemin des Dames and concealed by woodland. The British did not even have grenades. The BEF suffered 12,000 casualties. Their commanders, who were not trained to fight a modern war, were lost for a solution or even a strategy. It was on the Chemin des Dames that the first trenches of the Western Front were dug and where the line that would stretch from the Swiss frontier to the North Sea began. The Battle of the Aisne saw the dawn of trench warfare and a stalemate that would last for the next four years. Wide-ranging archival research by author Paul Kendall makes this the first in-depth study of the battle in print. His correspondence with surviving relatives of those who fought brings a human face to the terrible casualty statistics that would come to define the trenches.

In the spring of 1917 the Arras offensive was begun to break the stalemate of the Western Front by piercing the formidable German defences of the Hindenburg Line. The village of Bullecourt lay at the southern end of the battle front, and the fighting there over a period of six weeks from 11 April until late May 1917, epitomised the awful trench warfare of World War I.In Bullecourt 1917, Paul Kendall tells the stories of the fierce battles fought by three British and three Australian divisions in an attempt to aid Allenbys Third Army break out from Arras. Approximately 10,000 Australian and 7,000 British soldiers died, many of whom were listed as missing and have no known grave. The battle caused much consternation due to the failure of British tanks in supporting Australian infantry on 11 April, but despite the lack of tank and artillery support the Australian infantry valiantly fought their way into the German trenches. It took a further six weeks for British and Australian infantry to capture the village. This book tells the story of this bitter battle and pays tribute to the men who took part. Crucially, Paul Kendall has contacted as many of the surviving relatives of the combatants as he could, to gain new insight into those terrible events on the Hindenburg Line.

Aristocrats and itinerants, unionists and nationalists, Catholics and Protestants the Great War united thousands of Clare men and women to a cause for which many of them would go out to fight and die. Their motives varied from a sense of duty to king and country to concern about the fate of poor Catholic Belgium; from mercenary motives, fuelled by poverty, to the moral duty to fight for civilization against the savage Huns. Some followed Redmonds call to secure Home Rule, while others enlisted for sheer adventure. The work attempts, for the first time, to understand what really happened in County Clare during the Great War, how its economic and political life was radically transformed during this terrible conflict, and how the contribution of those who gave their lives was largely written out of history.

La biografía más completa y documentada de una de las figuras más importantes de la Historia.«21 de enero de 1924. Lenin ha muerto. Un inmenso país, la Unión de Repúblicas Socialistas Soviéticas, que

Para los Aliados occidentales, el 11 de noviembre de 1918 siempre ha sido una fecha solemne: el fin de los combates que habían masacrado a una generación, y también la reivindicación de un tremendo sacrificio, con el desmoronamiento total de sus principales enemigos, el Imperio aleman, Austria-Hungria y el Imperio otomano. Sin embargo, para gran parte del resto de Europa se trataba de una fecha carente de significado, ya que una interminable serie de terribles conflictos fue afectando a un pais tras otro. En este libro, sumamente original y absorbente, Robert Gerwarth nos pide que volvamos a reflexionar sobre el verdadero legado de la Primera Guerra Mundial. En gran medida, lo que acabo siendo un factor tan desastroso para el futuro de Europa no fueron los combates en el Frente Occidental, sino las devastadoras secuelas de la Gran Guerra, a medida que los paises de ambos bandos del conflicto original sufrian el azote de las revoluciones, de los pogromos, de las expulsiones masivas y de nuevos conflictos a gran escala. Si bien en casi todas partes la guerra en si habia sido una contienda que se libro exclusivamente entre las tropas de los distintos estados, los nuevos conflictos tuvieron como protagonistas sobre todo a los civiles y a los grupos paramilitares, y millones de personas murieron a lo largo y ancho del centro, el este y el sur de Europa antes del nacimiento de la URSS y de una serie de nuevos estados endebles y exhaustos. Por doquier habia gentes con sed de venganza, atormentadas por un sentimiento homicida de injusticia, buscando la oportunidad de tomar represalias contra sus enemigos reales o imaginarios. Tan solo una decada despues, el ascenso del Tercer Reich y de otros estados totalitarios les brindo la posibilidad que estaban esperando.

It was a war that shaped the modern world, fought on five continents, claiming the lives of ten million people. Two great nations met each other on the field of battle for the first time. But were they so very different? For the first time, and drawing widely on archive material in the form of original letters and diaries, Peter Doyle and Robin Schafer bring together the two sides, Fritz and Tommy, to examine cultural and military nuances that have until now been left untouched: their approaches to war, their lives at the front, their greatest fears and their hopes for the future. The soldiers on both sides went to war with high ideals; they experienced horror and misery, but also comradeship/Kameradschaft. And with increasing alienation from the people at home, they drew closer together, the Hun transformed into good old Jerry by the wars end. This unique collaboration is a refreshing yet touching examination of how little truly divided the men on either side of no-mansland during the First World War.

The lives, deaths, poetry, diaries and extracts from letters of sixty-six soldier-poets are brought together in this limited edition of Anne Powells unique anthology; a fitting commemoration for the centenary of the First World War. These poems are not simply the works of well-known names such as Wilfred Owen though they are represented they have been painstakingly collected from a multitude of sources, and the relative obscurity of some of the voices makes the message all the more moving. Moreover, all but five of these soldiers lie within forty-five miles of Arras. Their deaths are described here in chronological order, with an account of each mans last battle. This in itself provides a revealing gradual change in the poetry from early naive patriotism to despair about the human race and the bitterness of Dulce et Decorum Est.

Soon after the start of the Great War, work hastily began on a series of hutted camps in Wiltshire for more than 100,000 men, and during the course of the war it became home to troops from Canada, Australia and New Zealand as well as Britain. With soldiers forming a third of the population the effect on the businesses, farms, and indeed the morals of the county was dramatic. Even after the Armistice peace did not return, with mutinies and rioting in the camps because of frustration at delays in demobilization. Wiltshire and the Great War describes this turbulent, fascinating period in depth. It describes pre-war training, showing how inappropriate it was to future warfare, outlines the pioneering of military aviation in the county and describes the role of railways in moving tens of thousands of troops. There are accounts of shirkers, spies, escaped prisoners of war, prostitutes, the landship that clanked across the county and the wireless station that pinpointed the position of Zeppelins. Also described are advances in military technology, the camp-building scandals that led to an inquiry by a Royal Commission, press censorship, and the blighting of the Stonehenge landscape.

The Somme is a name with particular resonance for the people of Britain, for here, in 1916, the flower of her youth was cut down. Terrible though that day was, it takes its place in a wider story: the long, painful process of learning how to fight a new kind of war. From the war movement of 1914, when the French fought on the fields of the Somme, the conflict evolved to massive frontal assaults by the British and Allied troops in 1916. Here the first tank was first used in September 1916. Increasing sophistication in the terrifying use of artillery by the Germans broke the Allied lines in March 1918. Allied use of this same technology was then combined with other arms to create the fighting complex that inflicted the Black Day on the German army in August and smashed the Hindenberg Line in September. Thus the British, Australian, Canadian, American and French forces defeated the German Army in the field at last. This book reveals how the Somme was the bloody classroom in which this new art of war was studied and it tells the story of the men who paid the price for this knowledge with their own blood.

At Le Cateau on 26 August 1914, the commanders of the Second Corps of the British Expeditionary Force elected to fight the German First Army and, although outnumbered three to one, delivered such a smashing blow to the German invaders that the whole of the BEF was able to continue the Retreat to Compiegne without being seriously threatened. Although the British suffered 1,200 of their men and officers killed, and were forced to leave their dead and many of their wounded on the battlefield, as well as thirty-six of their field guns, they inflicted losses on von Klucks army of nearly 9,000. Yet the architect of this feat of arms, Second Corps commander Sir Horace Smith-Dorrien, was sacked soon afterward, while First Corps commander Sir Douglas Haig, who had performed far less impressively, took command of the whole BEF. Antony Bird describes the battle, its aftermath and he examines the men, the weapons and the tactics that made this feat of arms possible.

This book covers not only the three major events on the Eastern Front, the battle of Tannenburg and the March and October Revolutions, it also dispels some of the myths that have grown up around the Tsars army: their often-cited inability to adapt to modern warfare being one. The nationalist formations and the Revolutionary units of the Provisional Goverment are also described, something difficult if not impossible to find in other publications. 140 photographs and six maps bring the Eastern Front into sharp focus.