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The Vanquished

Why the First World War Failed to End
Jul 19, 2017dennismmiller rated this title 4 out of 5 stars
After the guns fell silent across the western front on the 11th of November, 1918, the Western Allies entered a peaceful reverie that lasted, with brief disturbances, until September of 1939. The result is a clear division between the world wars. But, as Robert Gerwath relates in The Vanquished, the experience of those decades was very different for those in the empires - German, Austrian, Russian, Ottoman - whose defeat in the War resulted in their dissolution. In the East, the War continued for years after peace was formally declared, as the lines drawn on a map at Versailles were rewritten in blood across the landscape, and the conventional rationales of the First World War were gradually replaced by a new, genocidal logic. Gerwath briskly and readably relates the bloody chaos and anarchy, and even bloodier order, that attended the revolutions and counter-revolutions, civil wars and territorial wars, of the early twenties, The remainder of the inter-war period is only briefly summarized. There are some oddities of organization - the rise of Mussolini is described several chapters before the saga of D'Annunzio's seizure of Fiume, for example - but these do not prevent The Vanquished from being a compelling and informative account of a much-neglected but vitally important chapter in the history of the twentieth century.