Download The War That Ended Peace: The Road to 1914 AudioBook Free
In the best-selling and award-winning author of Paris 1919 comes a masterpiece of narrative nonfiction, a fascinating portrait of European countries from 1900 up to the outbreak of World War I. The century since the end of the Napoleonic wars had been the most peaceful era Europe had known since the land of the Roman Empire. Within the first years of the twentieth century, Europe assumed it was marching to a fantastic, happy, and prosperous future. But instead, complicated personalities and rivalries, colonialism and cultural nationalisms, and shifting alliances helped to bring about the failing of the long peace and the outbreak of an war that changed Europe and the planet. The War That Ended Peacefulness brings vividly alive the military market leaders, politicians, diplomats, bankers, and the expanded, interrelated family of crowned mind across European countries who didn't stop the descent into battle: in Germany, the mercurial Kaiser Wilhelm II and the chief of the German basic personnel, Von Moltke younger; in Austria-Hungary, Emperor Franz Joseph, a man who tried, through sheer effort, to push away the coming chaos in his empire; in Russia, Tsar Nicholas II and his partner; in Britain, Ruler Edward VII, Primary Minister Herbert Asquith, and English admiral Jacky Fisher, the brutal advocate of naval reform who entered into the hands contest with Germany that pressed the continent toward confrontation on land and sea. There will be the would-be peacemakers as well, among them prophets of the horrors of future wars whose warnings gone unheeded: Alfred Nobel, who donated his fortune to the reason for international understanding, and Bertha von Suttner, a writer and activist who was simply the first girl awarded Nobel's new Peacefulness Reward. Here too we meet up with the urbane and cosmopolitan Count up Harry Kessler, who observed lots of the early symptoms that something was stirring in European countries; the young Winston Churchill, then First Lord of the Admiralty and a rising figure in English politics; Madame Caillaux, who taken a man who might have been a power for peace; and much more. With indelible portraits, MacMillan shows the way the fateful decisions of a few powerful people changed the span of history. Taut, suspenseful, and impossible to put down, The War That Ended Peacefulness is also a wise cautionary reminder of how wars happen regardless of the near-universal aspire to keep the peace. Destined to become a classic in the custom of Barbara Tuchman's The Guns of August, The War That Ended Peacefulness enriches our knowledge of one of the defining cycles and incidents of the twentieth century.
