No one wanted this war to start, but as a result of a combination of circumstances that may seem random, it turned out to be inevitable. Participants in the flaring up conflict believed that the war would not last long and would end in their complete victory by Christmas 1914, but the truce was signed only more than four years later, in November 1918. The First World War led to incalculable suffering and casualties on the front and in the rear, to epidemics, genocide, the collapse of great empires and revolutions. She changed the fate of the world and redrew its maps. Many hoped that this war, which was called the Great, would be the last in history, but it turned out to be the forerunner of the even more destructive Second World War. The world-renowned British historian Sir Martin Gilbert has written a complete history of the First World War, based on documentary sources, established facts and eyewitness accounts, and managed to convincingly reveal its causes and consequences. He managed to show the human cost of this war, which claimed and maimed millions of lives, through the prism of the stories of individual participants, among whom were both heroes and deserters.