返回Google圖書搜尋

The Twelve Days: 24 July to 4 August 1914

出版	Hutchinson, 1964
URL	http://books.google.com.hk/books?id=6fFmAAAAMAAJ&hl=&source=gbs_api

註釋"Could the Great War of 1914 have been prevented? Could some twist in events have arrested a calamity costing millions of lives? Could some gift of statesmanship have turned the world aside from its fatal path as it lurched to destruction just fifty years ago? Somewhere in the happenings of twelve days lies the answer to these questions. In that brief and crowded period at the end of the July 1914, the decisions were taken, the mischief was launched, the blunders were made, so that at the end there was no escaping the war that nobody wanted. Mr Thomson has sought to establish where it all went wrong. He shows how a series of apparently unrelated strands--private lives, quirks of personality, ironies of coincidence--took their place in the complex pattern. He sets out, in masterly fashion, a vast drama set within its human context, so that we see Jaurès, the generous Socialist leader, as he drives to his murder by a fanatic; Mme Caillaux, wife of the French Minister of Finance, involved in a sensational murder trial; Count Berchtold, Foreign Minister of the Austrian Empire, a trifler who led his country and the world to disaster; and Sir Edward Grey, the Englishman who south peace and brought war. As the scene changes from Paris to the Baltic, from St. Petersburg to Vienna, from London to a remote Balkan railway junction, here, built up by countless small touches, is the atmosphere of the last days of peace in Europe's fatal summer."--Front flap of book jacket.