For the people of Britain, the British Empire and France, the First World War ended at the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month of 1918; that is what we continue to commemorate as the conclusion of that particular and horrific bloodletting. And in the collective memory of the same states, this was followed by two decades of peace and reconstruction, which were brought to an end only with Nazi Germany's invasion of Poland and the start of the Second World War. However, as Robert Gerwarth convincingly argues in this gripping, excellent volume, for most of the rest of Europe, and particularly for those in Central Europe, there was no such let-up, no such clear division between war and peace.
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