• ‘The Gilded Age’ was how Americans came to describe the pre-war years. But the term captured the way that Europeans, too, began to think of this era. The Parisian bourgeoisie remembered ‘la belle époque’ as the time when French culture was the envy of the world, when Paris seemed the centre of civilization. The propertied classes of Berlin looked back at ‘the Wilhelmine era’ as a period of wealth, security, grandeur and the national stature that befitted the recently united Germany. Vienna, too, seemed at a pinnacle of its cultural glory, intellectual brilliance and historic imperialist grandeur. Munich, Prague, Budapest, St Petersburg, Moscow and other cities across the continent shared in an efflorescence of culture.

• John Maynard Keynes famously wrote after the war of ‘the inhabitant of London’ who could order ‘by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, in such quantity as he might see fit, and reasonably expect their early delivery upon his doorstep’.

• In Austria-Hungary, Kaiser Franz Joseph, who had been on the throne since 1848 at the head of a sprawling multi-national Habsburg Empire of over 50 million subjects, seemed to symbolize the durability of monarchical rule.

• The Tsar changed the name of the Russian capital to Petrograd in response to the frenzy. St Petersburg sounded too German.

• The armies that went to war in 1914 were nineteenth-century armies. They were about to fight a twentieth-century war.

• More than any previous war, this was a war of industrialized mass slaughter. Human flesh stood against killing machines. Facing soldiers were heavy artillery, machine guns, quick-firing rifles, trench mortars, high explosives, grenades, flamethrowers and poison gas.

• War as the driver of technological change introduced novel weaponry and methods of mass killing that marked the face of the future. Poison gas came into wide use from 1915 onwards after the Germans had deployed it in the spring of that year during the attack on Allied positions near Ypres. Tanks made their debut on the Somme as part of the British offensive in 1916 and by 1918 were being used in major battlefield formations. Submarines became from 1915 onwards a significant weapon in the German campaign against Allied shipping and changed the nature of the war at sea. Not least, rapid development of aircraft technology exposed civilians of towns and cities as well as fighting forces at the fronts to the terrifying prospect of aerial bombardment, of which the bombs dropped on Liège in Belgium by a German Zeppelin airship as early as 6 August 1914 were a foretaste.

• War propaganda used the mass media to instil hatred of entire peoples. Belligerent states mobilized their populations in new ways. War was becoming total. The French press coined the term ‘la guerre totale’ – total war – in 1917 to capture the fact that front and homeland were bound together in the war effort.

• Over 2 million Africans served as soldiers and labourers. Around 10 per cent of them did not survive. The death rate among labourers – deployed in huge numbers in east Africa to carry heavy supplies – was about twice that level, higher than the death rate for British soldiers during the war.

• But the Turks enjoyed a major triumph the following year, 1915. This was in repelling an ill-fated, badly planned, ineptly executed attempt by the Allies, instigated by Winston Churchill as First Lord of the Admiralty (in effect, minister for the British Navy), to invade Turkey by landing a large force at Gallipoli in the Dardanelles in April of that year.

• Within weeks, the Turkish leadership had ordered the entire Armenian population of eastern Anatolia – around a million and a half – to be deported to the heart of the Syrian desert. Many died from disease or maltreatment during deportation or in camps when they arrived. Many more died in horrific massacres, part of a terrible murderous programme, backed by Turkish leaders. Estimates of the numbers of Armenian dead range between 600,000 and over a million.

• For that, over a million men had been killed or wounded. British and Dominion casualties had amounted to 419,654 men (127,751 of them killed), while French casualties totalled 204,353 and German some 465,000. In the horrendous scale of its losses, and for so little, the Somme was the most terrible battle on the western front during the First World War.

• This was the beginning of what quickly became tantamount to a military dictatorship, as Hindenburg and Ludendorff intervened ever more directly in government. One indication of this was the aim to end the war through unrestricted submarine attacks on Allied shipping, a strategy imposed over the opposition of the civilian government.

• The gamble was taken. From 1 February 1917, Germany began unrestricted submarine warfare. Allied and neutral shipping in British waters could now be attacked without warning. It was a catastrophic mistake.

• When these were concluded on 3 March 1918 at Brest-Litovsk (in today’s Belarus), which had been German army headquarters in the east, the terms imposed on the powerless Soviet government amounted to some of the most punitive and humiliating in modern history.

• The subsequent and almost equally savage dismemberment of Romania in May, in the Treaty of Bucharest signed between Romania on the one hand and Austria-Hungary, Germany, Bulgaria and the Ottoman Empire on the other, provided further major territorial gains for the Central Powers. If in this case the amputated territory went to Germany’s allies, Austria-Hungary and Bulgaria (with minor gains to the Ottomans), the real winner was again, plainly, Germany itself, whose sphere of domination now stretched over most of central, eastern and southern Europe. It was to be of short duration. More than that, future trouble on a grand scale was in store across all these multi-ethnic regions, whose territories were treated like pieces on a chessboard.

• By June 1918 American troops had joined Allied ranks – and were arriving at the rate of 200,000 a month. A big French counter-attack on the Marne, involving hundreds of Renault tanks backed by air cover, then swiftly mopped up 30,000 German prisoners. German morale started to crack, and before long it was collapsing.

• Germany was by now militarily as good as finished – not that the population at home was aware that defeat was imminent, since the worst had been concealed from it by propaganda that had continued to campaign for peace only after victory.

• Only 0.1 per cent of German casualties on the western front in the spring of 1917 arose from hand-to-hand fighting, compared with 76 per cent from artillery fire.

• All of this necessitated controlled economies and greatly increased state spending. Military spending alone reached unprecedented levels towards the end of the war – 59 per cent of Germany’s gross domestic product, 54 per cent of France’s, 50 per cent of Britain’s (though less advanced economies, such as those of Russia, Austria-Hungary or the Ottoman Empire could extract less).

• The German war effort had increasingly to be financed by domestic war loans. War-bond drives were deployed by all the belligerent states.

• The house of Habsburg, rulers of Austria for centuries, was now also bearing the price for an increasingly and massively unpopular war. The conflict, sparked by a dispute with Serbia that had become all but forgotten, had never enjoyed complete support from the beginning. It could scarcely be portrayed as a defensive war. And the dependency on Germany, even for whatever victories could be mustered, was too obvious to be comfortable. The centrifugal forces threatening to split and destroy the Habsburg Empire were hugely reinforced as the disastrous war ground on.

• The aged Emperor Franz Joseph had for decades been almost the sole symbol of unity in the enfeebled multi-national empire (in which the Hungarian half was, in its institutional structures, already more or less a separate entity). When he died in November 1916 it was in the midst of a mounting crisis of legitimacy, both for the war effort and for the Habsburg throne.

• The Habsburg Empire was visibly falling apart.

• In Hungary, despite the professed readiness of Emperor Karl to introduce liberal reforms and move to a more federally structured empire, pressure for independence from Vienna grew in the last war years, backed by socialists and many liberals.

• By late October, with extraordinary speed, Czechoslovakia, Hungary and what would become Yugoslavia were proclaiming their independence. Austria’s armistice with Italy on 3 November marked the end of its war effort. Emperor Karl reluctantly renounced his powers (though not his claim to the throne) on 11 November and spent the remaining three years of his life exiled in Switzerland and, finally, Madeira. Five centuries of Habsburg rule were over.

• The Armistice brought no end to the suffering and violence in Turkey, which was soon plunged into a war of independence that lasted until 1923, when a wrecked country eventually emerged from the ruins as an independent sovereign state.

• That America eventually left Europe with the task of clearing up much of its own mess played no small part in the unfolding crisis of the post-war era. But at the root of the catastrophic legacy lay something else. Crucially, out of the ruins of Imperial Germany, the Habsburg monarchy and Tsarist Russia an unholy constellation had been created that would have baleful consequences in the coming years.

• The war had brought immense, unimaginable human losses. The military dead totalled almost 9 million, the civilian dead (largely caused by mass deportation, famine and disease) close to 6 million.

• The United Kingdom’s military dead numbered 750,000 (a further 180,000 dead from across the empire), Italy’s almost half a million, France’s 1.3 million, Austria-Hungary’s almost 1.5 million, Russia’s around 1.8 million, Germany’s just over 2 million.

• Claims resting on ethnicity were almost invariably spurious – merely a (sometimes transparent) cover for territorial ambitions, driven by economic, military or strategic reasons. Claims and counter-claims – between Greece, Bulgaria and Serbia (all wanting some of Macedonia), between Greece and Italy (over Albania), between Romania and Hungary (both staking claims to Transylvania), or between Poland and Germany (disputing Silesia) – were all made by paying lip-service to self-determination, but they were actually no more than attempts at traditional territorial aggrandizement.

• A problem for the Allies was that many Germans did not recognize that their country had been militarily defeated. Germany was undestroyed after four years of war. No Allied troops had stood on German soil at the Armistice, though German forces at that time still occupied much of Belgium, and Luxembourg. German soldiers were welcomed home with festive flags and flowers.

• Germany was to lose some 13 per cent of its pre-war territory in Europe (including rich agricultural and industrial regions, mainly in the east), resulting in the exclusion of around 10 per cent of its pre-war population of 65 million. In economic terms, the losses were damaging but not irreparable. The real damage was political and psychological – the heavy blow to national pride and prestige.

• The deepest anger and resentment of all were reserved for Article 231 of the Treaty, and its implications. Article 231, later commonly known as ‘the war guilt clause’, deemed that Germany and its allies were responsible for the war. It provided the legal basis for Germany’s liability to pay reparations for war damages – vehemently demanded by a baying public opinion in both France and Britain.

• France, like Germany, was among the countries most advanced in adopting in large-scale industry the modern management methods pioneered in the USA by Frederick Winslow Taylor soon after the turn of the century and the mass-production techniques introduced into car manufacturing by Henry Ford in 1913. A

• After the war, as before 1914, Paris was a magnet for cultural energy and creativity, a centre of modernist vitality. Pablo Picasso, already famous as the creative force behind Cubism – new forms of three-dimensional abstract representation – who had made his home there before the war, was the most glittering star in the firmament. Artists from across the continent and beyond were drawn to the vibrancy of the French capital. So were modernist writers, including James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway and Ezra Pound.

• By then Stresemann, the architect of peaceful revisionism, was dead. He had achieved much in a short time, although he did not live to see the fruits of all his efforts: the ending of the Ruhr occupation, the end of supervision by the Allied Military Commission, the stabilization of the economy, the regulation of reparations, and the early evacuation of the Rhineland, quite apart from the Locarno Treaty and German entry into the League of Nations.

• Although sworn to uphold the democratic republic, Hindenburg, a pillar of the old monarchist regime, was no democrat but saw himself rather as a type of ersatz-Kaiser.

• Europe’s ‘golden twenties’ were, beneath the surface glitter, a tarnished, troubled time.

• He knew how to use it. Mussolini had needed three years to establish complete control over the Italian state. Hitler established his total domination in Germany within six months.

• The remilitarization of the Rhineland gave the coup de grâce to the Versailles and Locarno Treaties, and finally demolished lingering hopes of a lasting basis of security on the Franco-German borders.

• Even for contemporaries it was abundantly plain that three dictatorships – those of the Soviet Union, Italy and Germany – stood out from all the rest. By the mid-1930s their ideological confrontation – that of Soviet Bolshevism facing Italian Fascism and German National Socialism – was hardening visibly.

• In 1936 a new Soviet Constitution was promulgated (replacing the first constitution of 1924). Stalin proclaimed it ‘the most democratic of all the constitutions in the world’. It offered universal electoral franchise, civil rights, freedom of thought, the press, religion, organization and assembly, and guarantees of employment – all ‘in accordance with the interests of the working people and for purposes of strengthening the socialist system’. Seldom has a constitution lied so monumentally.

• Germany had the most advanced economy on the European continent, one being increasingly and rapidly tailored for war. And it had the most efficient military leadership.

• ‘The greatness of France, founded in the storm on the Bastille, has now through your signature become the laughing-stock of the world.’

• British planes dropped more bombs in March 1945 alone than in the first three years of the war.

• In all wars battlefield killing takes on its own momentum. The Second World War was no exception. In the campaigns in western Europe and in north Africa, however, the fighting was for the most part relatively conventional. In eastern Europe it was different. There the cruelty,

• Each of the four countries provided small contingents of fanatics who joined the foreign legions of the Waffen-SS. About 50,000 Dutch and 40,000 Belgians (both Flemings and French-speaking Walloons), 6,000 Danes and 4,000 Norwegians served.

• By the end of the war Britain was financially on its knees, the USA economically booming – the outright winner of the Second World War. Industrial production there had been greater during the war than at any earlier period of its history. Output had increased by 15 per cent a year (compared with 7 per cent during the First World War), and the productive capacity of the economy is estimated to have grown by 50 per cent. By 1944 no less than 40 per cent of the world’s armaments were produced in America. As British exports dwindled, American exports soared – two-thirds higher in 1944 than they had been in 1939.

• But outbursts of anti-Jewish violence in several Polish, Hungarian and Slovakian towns, the worst of them the pogroms in Kielce in Poland in July 1946 and, a few weeks later, in Miskolc in Hungary, left hundreds of Jews dead and forced many others to leave.

• NATO offered western Europe a sense of security that its own threadbare defences could not provide. Its importance was to a large extent symbolic, as an expression of unified commitment to the defence of western Europe. In reality, it was a fig-leaf. Soviet ground forces outnumbered those of the western Allies by 12 to 1; and only two of the latter’s fourteen divisions stationed in Europe were American.

• Under the shield of the United States, western Europe had the opportunity to find its own forms of unity and start to put the nationalist dangers of the recent past behind it.

• Out of the ashes, against all probabilities, a new Europe, divided within itself but with each part soon resting on more solid foundations than had ever seemed likely at the end of the war, had with remarkable speed taken distinct shape. The future lay open. But amid the lasting scars, physical and moral, of the most terrible war of all time, possibilities were emerging of a more stable and prosperous Europe than could ever have been imagined within living memory, in the decades when the continent had come close to self-destruction.