Author Richard M. Watt begins with the defeat of the Kaiser in 1918 and the convention of the Versailles conference, where Europe was to be remade. This was the time when the victorious Allies might have imposed democracy on Europe by means of a peace with justice. Watt's gripping narrative quickly becomes tragedy as diplomacy and politics fail at every turn. He tells of victorious Allies too greedy and short-sighted to impose equitable peace on a defeated Germany, of Woodrow Wilson's tortured betrayal of his own idealism, and of a German people caught up in the realities of revolution, anarchy, and violence--waiting for the inevitable rise of a leader to exact vengeance on Europe--a Fuhrer. What began with the church bells of victory and hopes ends a year later in the first appearance of Adolf Hitler as a political power.

    Jim Hilton, its hero, is a subaltern of nineteen when he goes out to Flanders for the first time in April 1916, and a veteran of twenty-one, twice wounded, married, gazetted Major, by the time his story ends. It is a story of courage and the waste of human life in the bloody carnage of the Ypres Salient and the Battle of the Somme that could have been written only by someone who was there and saw it, who was a participant in the struggle in which millions of men fought and died for narrow stretches of shattered ground and useless villages in an unending sea of mud.It is also the story of the women who waited for those men - the mothers, wives and sweethearts - snatching desperately at moments of pleasure in the frenetic gaiety of wartime leaves in London, returning home to dread every ring of the front-door bell. Stuart Cloete shows relentlessly the pressures of war upon individuals and society as his young hero, like thousands of others, seeks to fulfill himself in love as well as in battle and to thread his way between the two ultimate expressions of virility - the talking and making of life

    This crack force of armoured cruisers, led by Vice-Admiral von Spee, had the potential to be a menace to Allied shipping in the Pacific. On Winston Churchill's orders, a flotilla was dispatched to find and destroy the German warships. However, at the Bay of Coronel, it was the ships of the Royal Navy that were destroyed by von Spee's cruisers. Britain was stunned by the news. The Admiralty sent two powerful battle cruisers to deal with the German squadron once and for all. While refuelling at the Falkland Islands, the British were surprised to see von Spee appear over the horizon. He believed the islands to be unprotected. This was a fatal mistake. In the pursuit that followed, all but one of the German ships was sunk and there were few survivors. This was the last naval action fought without fear of mines, torpedoes or aircraft.

    It was here that General Townshend decided to hold out with his division of 10,000 combatant troops against a superior besieging force of Turks and Arab conscripts after his abortive attempt to capture Baghdad. The Siege of Kut lasted one hundred and forty-seven days - an epic of endurance, starvation and disease - until Townshend finally surrendered.