"The lamps are going out all over Europe. We shall not see them lit again in our lifetime." These were the words of British Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey on the eve of what was known as the "Great War" in 1914. Assumptions of the past century, that diplomacy could arrest all military and political ambition, and that collective security was common sense for all nations, the world was pitched into the bloodiest war in human history. World at War: 1914-39 uses contemporaneous reports and photographs from the famed Daily Mail archives, including many eyewitness accounts, to dramatize the conflicts as they developed, including the key battles, tactical decisions, and turning points that ended the devastation.
What we now call World War I in fact never ended, as the series of conflicts including the Bolshevik Revolution, the Spanish Civil War, Japan's invasion of China, and Italy's of Ethiopia, and finally Germany's takeover of Czechoslovakia and Poland launched the world into World War II.