The continued relevance of Keynes’s famous polemic, after more than a century, is itself remarkable. It has always been controversial: first as polemic, then as economic analysis, and finally as historiography. In which genre should we place it? The literary force of its vignettes of the key participants must be acknowledged. Likewise the concentration on reparations in linking the Armistice to a burden of post-war debt highlights the notion of guilt. And the distinction between historic ‘indemnities’ and the wholly new coinage of ‘reparations’ still needs to be better understood. Hence the inescapable centrality of Article 231 of the Treaty, the famous War Guilt Clause. Subsequent controversy has focused largely on assessments of the actual burden that reparations posed – or would have done if actually paid. Here the salience of Etienne Mantoux’s contribution in 1945 is still worthy of acknowledgment (though, ironically, not in castigating Keynes as ‘anti-French’). Instead, the ongoing significance of the analysis presented in the Economic Consequences points to the centrality of Keynes’s vision of the welfare of Europe as an integrated organic whole – rather than seeing the Treaty as a zero-sum game in which Germany had to punished, for moral as much as economic reasons.

This chapter examines the Italian occupation between June 1940 and November 1942. Despite covering only a small area of territory, the Italian government saw the occupation as essential to its policy of prestige. Rome, therefore, sought to impose Italianisation, seeing its occupation zone as an opportunity for annexation by stealth. The Italian occupation was thus more akin to the German treatment of Alsace-Lorraine or northern France than the wider German zone of occupation. Defending French territorial integrity was at the heart of Vichy’s claim to legitimacy. However, the French government’s political choices ultimately determined its response. Vichy’s decision to prioritise collaboration with Berlin over objecting to the German annexation of Alsace-Lorraine constrained its ability to oppose similar developments in the Italian zone of occupation. Vichy, therefore, consigned itself to accepting ‘relative’ sovereignty over French territory. In so doing, it experienced further humiliation in failing to prevent de facto territorial annexation by an Italian army whose claims of victory it rejected.

After losing 500,000 soldiers in Russia during 1812, Napoleon quickly rebuilt his army in early 1813 to stop the pursuing Russians in Germany. His strategic situation took an unfavorable turn after Prussia broke its alliance with him and joined the Russians and British to form the Sixth Coalition. With Austria choosing to remain neutral, the Allies hoped to achieve a victory to convince Vienna to join the Coalition. Although the Allies took the offensive against his raw conscripts, Napoleon remained the master of operations. He drove the Allied army over 200 miles eastward in one month, earning important yet indecisive victories at Lützen and Bautzen. With the Allied army pinned against the Oder River in eastern Silesia, Napoleon agreed to an armistice brokered by the Austrians. Both sides used the time to build up massive forces and to woe Austria but Napoleon’s intransigence drove them to join the Coalition. After the armistice expired on 17 August, Napoleon won his only victory in the campaign at Dresden on 27 August. For the first time in the history of the coalition wars, the Allies had a plan of operations that Napoleon could not overcome. For the next six weeks, he chased phantoms, exhausting his troops, and grinding his army into the ground while the Allies defeated his subordinates in Silesia, Bohemia, and Saxony. Finally, tired of running after an elusive enemy, Napoleon allowed himself to be surrounded in the city of Leipzig in the hope of finally waging and winning a decisive battle. The contest started on 16 October and ended with Napoleon commencing the retreat to France with a battered army on 19 October. Germany was lost.

After following the retreat to Dunkirk, and the evacuation by sea of thousands of British and French soldiers, Chapter 4 examines the impact of Weygand’s command. Weygand’s organization of his so-called “hedgehogs” on the Aisne supposedly revived French resolve and resilience. In fact, examination of the archives reveals that these “hedgehogs” were improvized and most collapsed quite quickly. Second, more concerned with an imaginary communist uprising in Paris rather than prolonging French resistance to an inexorable German advance, Weygand’s defeatism and fear of popular insurrection became a major catalyst in France’s decision to request an armistice. The chapter concludes with a summary of the maneuvers and calculations in the French cabinet and High Command that scuppered the opportunity to fight on from the colonies and solidified support for the armistice.

Chapter 8 reassesses the question of why it ultimately proved impossible to end the Great War earlier and through a “peace without victory” along the lines the American president Wilson and other proponents of a negotiated settlement proposed. Then it re-examines how the war actually came to an end in the west. And analyses the making and consequences of the armistice that was finally concluded on 11 November 1918, highlighting that it only provided frail foundations and parameters for a modern Atlantic peace.

Chapter Seven, Legacies, draws the stories of some of the central characters to a close and following them home. The Armistice could not reverse the disruption of the First World War; the webs of empire were further tangled by these encounters experienced by these colonial troops. Through mutiny, migration, war marriages and memorialisation, I explore the consequences of these interactions in the years after the war’s end to show how the networks of the First World War endured beyond the end of the conflict. The experience of encounters, much like the experience of combat and frontline labour, was newly acquired ‘cultural baggage’ and part of being a veteran in the interwar colonies and dominions.

After the armistice on the Western Front in 1918, the United States provided major food aid programs across Central and Eastern Europe. The American Relief Administration and the American Red Cross rushed into these fragile new nation-states where violence was ongoing with programs aimed largely at children. The JDC jumped aboard other American emergency relief efforts, which helped it reach Poland and later Russia, where Jews were in greatest need. Deployed around Europe, American Jews distributed emergency food relief, medicines, sanitary supplies, and clothing during harsh winters. Much like American postwar diplomacy carried out by the ARA and through private loans with tacit and direct support from the US government, Jewish “diplomacy” was carried out by the JDC, a private humanitarian association. American Jews led the way for American humanitarians of all kinds: as food remitters and as the first American organization in Soviet Russia. American Jewish relief paradoxically appeared as a peripheral humanitarian undertaking and as a central partner in the main humanitarian projects of the day.

As the end of the war approached, inter-Allied competition came more clearly to the surface, as did Italian Adriatic ambitions. This cast a shadow on the Peace Conference, and particularly on Anglo-Italian relations.

This chapter opens the third section of the book on the aftermath of the war. It addresses the end of the war and its many legacies. It starts with the armistice, and then considers the discussion about enemy aliens during the peace conference; it also explores the treaties that ended the war and their consequences for aliens, citizenship and property rights. It continues with the signing of all the final treaties, the emptying of the concentration camps and the lifting of the provisions on foreign movements, the agreement that regulated restitution or liquidation of assets, and the final exchange of populations. The chapter covers the period up to the late 1920s and deals with the transition from the state of emergency to peace, the resumption of naturalization procedures, new rules on borders and migration, new citizenship regimes that emerged from the war in both victorious and defeated countries as well as in the new successor states, and mass denaturalization and statelessness as a consequence of the emergence of new political regimes (such as the Soviet Union) or population exchange. It investigates the impact of special legislation on alien and enemy aliens on policies of migration control and explores the debate among jurists about the many violations of the conventions and human rights and the failed attempts at writing a new convention on enemy aliens.

This chapter examines the immediate impact of the ending of the war for Irish women in the public and private spheres before considering the longer-term effects of the war for women in Ireland.While the cessation of hostilities brought enormous relief to women anxiously awaiting the return of their loved ones, in many cases it accentuated the trauma and grief of those bereaved by the war. This chapter argues that Irish women faced particular difficulties arising from the swift demobilisation of war workers which resulted in high levels of unemployment, the more limited relief available from the British government, and the political instability in the years immediately following the war. The impact of ex-servicemen returning home to family and domestic life and women’s role within the home is examined, making use of autobiographical novels. Towards the end of the war, the press returned repeatedly to the vexed issue of women’s role in society, raising the spectre of the ‘superfluous woman’. Despite the wartime loss, the chapter’s examination of the 1926 census reports for the Free State and Northern Ireland concludes that such fears were unfounded and marital prospects were little changed by the war.

Explains what happens to military music in the aftermath of the Great War. Briefly explains the establishment of the RAF Music School by Henry Walford Davies in 1918, and goes on to explain what happened to various organisations and individuals who have featured in the book. This chapter also features the role of music in remembrance, particularly in the first Festivals of Remembrance, 1923-27.

Focusing upon the more-or-less contemporaneous Korean war, and the agreement ending the war at Panmunjom in 1953, this chapter focuses upon the way in which the Cold War is evoked, not in terms of a singular event with a singular beginning and a singular ending but, rather, as a series of events with multiple points of beginning and even multiple endings – an ‘end’ that does not occur all at once but is delivered in a series of instalments through time. In light of that analysis the question is raised whether the announcement that the Cold War is over is not merely a way of keeping it alive, preserving its historical valence in the present through its repression. What this brings into view, it is suggested, is the idea that the Cold War was not simply a titanic contest between self-styled hegemons, but rather a headlong struggle for the supreme model of political organisation in which command over history itself is one of the necessary objectives.