Crucible

Nobody believed a modern war could last so long—but by 1917, Europe had already been at war for three years. The fabric of the continent had unraveled and now, just as the first American troops docked in European ports, the continent began to collapse from the inside: first Russia, then Austria-Hungary, soon Germany, then the Ottoman Empire.Historians have long divided World War I into neat divisions of conflict—1914 to 1918—and peace, after the Treaty of Versailles in 1919. Yet in his new, remarkable history, Charles Emmerson reveals that Europe had already begun its metamorphosis long before the war's end—and that the finale was longer, bloodier, and more complex than we've previously been told. As Russia spiraled into revolution with the fall of the Romanovs and the rise of the Bolsheviks, Germany was violently combatting communism within its own borders. As civil war fomented in Ireland, Mustafa Kemal was reinventing himself as father of the...