By the beginning of 1916 the French had already suffered 2 million casualties, and Russia was on the brink of collapse. In this second volume (following Into the Abyss), G.J. Meyer recounts the apocalyptic struggles at Verdun and the Somme, the dramatic entrance of the United States into the war, and Germany's failed 1918 Spring Offensive. Meyer also looks at the phase after the Armistice, when the victors debated the new world order, even as a quarter of a million German civilians died of starvation and disease under a pointless naval blockade.