A remarkable, eyewitness-based view of the outbreak of the First World War. As war broke out in the summer of 1914, not a nation on Earth understood the magnitude of what they were about to face. To win it, whole populations must be mobilised, and neutrality was impossible to practice.

Our understanding of this complex conflict has been coloured by a blinkered approach to popular history. It has ignored the fact that Denmark actively participated in laying minefields as soon as war began; that the first British shots were fired in West Africa, by a black man; and the first Australian casualties occurred not at Gallipoli, but in the Pacific. The authors have scoured the globe in search of an enormous quantity of fresh material.

This is not history as told by ‘great men’, this is a people’s view of the war, translated from more than a dozen languages to fashion a new inclusive, touching and surprising tale of events that we thought we knew…