ABSTRACT
War mutated in 1918 in such a way as to create a violent field of force extending to all of the successor states replacing the four empires which collapsed in the last year of the fighting. This mutation meant that a constellation of conflicts overlapped and distorted the political and economic reconstruction of Europe after the armistice of 11 November 1918. The ravages of class conflict, ethnic conflict, including a new form of anti-Semitism, alongside national struggles and international intervention on the one hand, and a set of devastating outbreaks of epidemic disease on the other, disfigured the landscape of the new Europe. The toll in lives in this tsunami of post-armistice violence between 1918 and 1924 was about the same as that between 1914 and 1918.
