On a summer day in 1914, a 19-year-old Serbian nationalist gunned down Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo. In less than a month, a combination of ambition, fear, jealousy, and miscalculation sent Austro-Hungarian troops marching into Serbia, German troops streaming toward Paris, and a vast Russian army into war, with Britain as her ally. As G.J. Meyer recounts in this first volume, no one could guess what lay ahead: years of slaughter that would reduce many of the world's empires to rubble.