In CATASTROPHE: EUROPE GOES TO WAR 1914 Max Hastings, best-selling author of the acclaimed All Hell Let Loose, answers at last how World War I could ever have begun. Ranging across Europe, from Paris to St. Petersberg, from Kings to corporals, Catastrophe 1914 traces how tensions across the continent kindled into a blaze of battles; not the stalemates of latertrench-warfare but battles of movement and dash where Napoleonic tactics met with weapons from a newly industrialised age.