Amazon.com description: Product Description: This fascinating title sets the world scene in the years before the start of World War I. Readers will get a snapshot of the political and social climates of the five great European powers: Britain, France, Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Russia. Rapid industrial development and a movement toward solving differences through military action led countries to create alliances between them. The feeling in Europe was that war was inevitable, and Germany was the first to make the move. Find out how an assassination set off a chain of declarations of war, and how Germany put their war machine into motion with the Schlieffen Plana strategy that called for the invasion of neutral countries.