The last decades before the Great War, which would become the First World War... Europe is on the verge of one of the global catastrophes of the twentieth century, which entailed terrible casualties, once again redrawing the borders of states and the fate of entire nations. The slow decline of Great Britain, trying to retain the remnants of recent Victorian greatness, – and the struggle of the German Empire for a place in the sun. The shameful “Dreyfus affair”, which shook up all civilized countries, and the unprecedented rise of the international anarchist movement. The aristocracy is still strong and powerful, the people are still poor and destitute, but the first tremors are already heard - the harbingers of a monstrous earthquake that will destroy centuries-old empires and change forever the very course of world history. This is the world that the famous writer Barbara Tuckman, two-time Pulitzer Prize winner and author of “The Guns of August”, reveals to the reader!