This work follows Britain's path from the day the fatal shots were fired at Sarajevo in June 1914 to the moment the guns finally fell silent on 11th November, 1918. Simon Heffer examines the increasingly frantic conversations between Whitehall and Britain's embassies across Europe as civil servants and ministers sought to understand and control the slide towards war. He explains how a government so keen to avoid conflict found itself not only championing it but seeking to transform the country to fight it - and how, in the process, Britain was irrevocably changed. He looks at the high politics and low skulduggery that saw the principled but passive Asquith replaced as Prime Minister by the unscrupulous but energetic Lloyd George, and he assesses the arguments between politicians and generals about how to prosecute the war that persisted until the final offensive on the Western Front.
