The Vanquished

The Vanquished: Why the First World War Failed to End by Robert Gerwath, 267 pages

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.