Originally published in 1924, this is the young Charles de Gaulle's analysis of the major errors that led the Germans to disaster in World War I. Based partly on observations made during his internment as a prisoner of war from 1916 to 1918, it can be seen as the foundation for everything he wrote in the 1920s and 1930s in the shadow of German resurgence and for much of what he said and did after the Nazi victory in June of 1940. To de Gaulle, the German conduct of the Great War and the events of 1918 were the greatest moral disasters ever to befall a modern civilised political community. He seeks to identify the internecine causes of the collapse of the German war effort in 1918 and the subsequent dissolution of the German Empire. His diagnosis of the profound moral crisis that unfolded in Germany during World War I points forward to 1940, for de Gaulle understood the fall of France, above all, as a moral catastrophe for the French.