<DIV>The First World War was the overwhelming disaster from which everything else in the twentieth century stemmed. Fourteen million combatants died, four empires were destroyed, and even the victors' empires were fatally damaged. World War I took humanity from the nineteenth century forcibly into the twentieth?and then, at Versailles, cast Europe on the path to World War II as well.<P> In <I>World War One</I>, Norman Stone, one of the world's greatest historians, has achieved the almost impossible task of writing a terse and witty short history of the war. A captivating, brisk narrative, <I>World War One</I> is Stone's masterful effort to make sense of one of the twentieth century's pivotal conflicts.</DIV>