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At the selected date, the colour of each place shows who held it. To learn its story, click or tap a country or marker.
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In the summer of 1914, forty-three years had passed since Europe’s great powers had fought one another. Then, five weeks after a wrong turn in Sarajevo, all of them were at war. Alliances and mobilization timetables helped bring them into the conflict, and on every side there was a conviction that it would be short. It lasted fifty-one months. A trench stretched from the sea to Switzerland, soldiers and laborers came from every inhabited continent, and around twenty million people died. Four empires that entered the war did not survive it.
How had Europe come to this point, and what emerged from the fighting? Fifteen chapters begin with the proclamation of the German Empire in 1871, follow the alliances and Balkan crises that armed the continent and the war itself, and end with the treaties and border wars that drew the map of 1923. The map shows the blocs forming, fronts crawling forward and arrows breaking against them, before new states assemble from the wreckage. Scrub the timeline and interrogate any country; then sit the Field Exam when you can read a situation map as the general staffs did, and see what they could not.
Keys: ←→ chapters · space play time · +− zoom · ⌘K search · ? all keys.
You can return to the library of twenty-one atlases at any time: select the balloon at the top left.