The author (London, 1936), professor at Merton College, Oxford, was Winston Churchill's official biographer and, among other books he published, are Second World War (1986), The Holocaust (1990) and The Day the War Ended (1995). As for First World War, Gilbert explains in the opening pages that the attempt to recount a conflict in which 9 million soldiers died would require the writing of 20,000 books like this one, with only one page devoted to each soldier. Nevertheless, Gilbert has the good sense to intersperse hundreds of anecdotes from singular biographies that he has had the patience to study separately among the abstract data of strategies, alliances and overall assessments. This approach explains why this history also tells us what later "famous" people, such as McMillan, Witgenstein, E. Hemingway, Einstein, A. Eden, A. Hitler, H. Truman, H. Göring, B. Mussolini, Pétain and D. McArthur, or the part played by W. Churchill in the invention of the battle tank (1917), were doing in the 1914-18 war. The author takes care to soften the account of personal cruelties, although he cannot conceal the horrors of the use of asphyxiating gases (chlorine, at first, then phosgene, iperite, etc.). It may be said that this is a story told from the English point of view, but it refrains from moral qualifications about the actions of either side.