The 'end' of a war that was supposed to end all wars laid the foundations of the biggest slaughter in human history, WWII, when it imposed a humiliating and crippling treaty on Germany, a humiliation that was coupled with the impacts of the Great Depression, spawning the Nazis, who wanted a place under the sun, and propelled the U.S. to occupy a hegemonic place and displace the old empires. "The structural reality is that the First World War took place over empires, for empires, and between empires. For a clear-eyed portrait of the world that it yielded, there is no better place to start than the opening chapter of Dominic Lieven’s study of Tsarist Russia’s road to war, To the Flame , the latest major contribution to the scholarship of the conflict. In it, Lieven lays out the codes and aims of conduct shared by the ruling classes of Europe, saturated with considerations of honour, prestige and virility, for whom territorial aggrandizement was an automatic criterion of