Supreme Allied Commander Marshal Ferdinand Foch accepted the German surrender in November 1918. The peace terms he advocated were so punitive that German would not have posed a threat to France again. According to Churchill, when he heard the terms of the Treaty of Versailles, Foch responded: ‘this is not a peace. It is an armistice for twenty years’. He was proved right.

This talk covers the international and domestic chaos into which the once Great Powers were thrown by the First World War. It addresses the grievances of the defeated powers which led to the rise of extreme left and right-wing regimes. It outlines the political state of the victorious nations in the inter-war period, the impact of the Great Depression, the failure of the League of Nations, as well as the origins and effect of appeasement.

The Great War was supposed to be the war to end all wars. This talk explains why the most devastating conflict the world has ever known occurred a mere two decades later.