Ring of Steel

Watson's writing did more than just explain the First World War from the perspective of Germany and Austria-Hungary - although that alone would have been enough to make it a fascinating read - but on top of that it gave me a window into the people themselves as the world they knew was torn apart and their future quite literally blown up before their very eyes.

After 1918, many German and Austrian Habsburg officers blamed their defeat on being ‘stabbed in the back’ by civilian ‘shirkers’, leftists, and (in the Habsburg case) fractious nationalists.

Both states indeed failed to manage their home fronts but, as Alexander Watson shows in his compelling account of this titanic conflict, there were far more complex reasons for the war’s outcome, not least the willingness of the high command in both states to embark on a conflict they had no realistic chance of winning.