By Matthew J. Davenport

A young man watches a fellow soldier beat a dog with the butt of a rifle and another soldier shoot the dog's owner -- a pregnant woman -- in cold blood, and simply calls the scene "war in all its horror." Another sets fire to a stranger's home in a town far from his own and admits "the desire to destroy took over," adding, "if war is like this, then it's very ugly." A third writes with equal detachment of the killings he has taken part in as "living in a perpetual nightmare."

One of these voices belongs to a member of the French army, one is Austro-Hungarian and the other German. Which uniform each man wears, or in which theater of war he is fighting, is less important than what his experiences have in common with the others. These are but three among the countless troops and civilians whose experiences are viewed with a fresh perspective in "Ring of Fire: A New History of the World at War, 1914," by Alexandra Churchill and Nicolai Eberholst.

Popular histories of World War I often reduce the worldwide conflict to two narrow fronts -- eastern and western -- both on a single western continent, with a primary focus on one of those two narrative boxes at the expense of the rest of the world. "Ring of Fire" widens that lens and recenters the narrative, turning the conventional, top-down approach on its head. It pulls away from the proclamations of men in corridors of power to focus our attention instead on a bottom-up view of how the war impacted everyday men, women and children -- lives lost, homes destroyed, jobs taken, food rationed, travel restricted, speech censored -- whether they went to war or the war came to them. Ms. Churchill is a historian and battlefield guide who has hosted documentaries on military and royal history; Mr. Eberholst is a historian and archivist. The two skip past the daily volleys of righteous indignation in July 1914 and take us directly to the streets of the nations headed to war. We see young men in St. Petersburg and Berlin and Paris driven by patriotism to enlist, immigrants in Australia viewing service as a free passage back to Europe, and tribesmen in Africa volunteering for the food and regular income the military promised -- with perils of combat paling next to recent famine.

"Ring of Fire" employs words with visual force to show us the opening shots of the war, following Germany's invasion of neutral Belgium, France's first offensive through Alsace-Lorraine, Austria-Hungary's attacks on Serbia, and Russia's bloody clashes with Austria-Hungary and Germany. In contrast to the recurring trope of "lions led by donkeys," we are shown armies adapting to modern, industrialized war and the replacement of incompetent field commanders with leaders who proved themselves effective during the war's first trials of combat. And we see the war's global reach, as the first British shot of the war is fired by an African soldier, the first British officer is killed in action in Germany's West African colony of Togoland and the first Australian officer is killed in action in German New Guinea.

We are reminded of how the war struck citizens of neutral nations, where freedoms are trampled by paranoid governments to avoid the appearance of partisanship under the watchful eye of warring powers, and where atrocities are inflicted by invading neighbors. The authors look beyond the well-documented German brutalities in Belgium to underscore the war crimes of rape and mass murder committed elsewhere -- in East Prussian villages by Russians and in West Russian villages by Germans. We hear the terrorized voices of the civilians and candid admissions of the soldiers who killed and pillaged, most after being fed dehumanizing propaganda about "the enemy." The authors don't expand to editorialize. They let the horror of war carry its own weight.

It takes a long time to tell the whole truth, especially about war. From a distance of 111 years, and by not attaching themselves to any century-old national cause, Ms. Churchill and Mr. Eberholst free themselves to explore the divided world and opposing cultures of August and September 1914, viewing causes and people with a fresh historical eye. The authors invite us to consider voices often sidelined in World War I coverage, such as the Danish residents of Schleswig who were drafted into the German army; or the Poles fighting under the flags of nations that had denied them statehood; or colonial troops from India, Africa and Indochina who had been forced into service -- by economic deprivation or conscription, and mostly for the Allies -- far from their own lands "like pawns on a giant imperial chessboard." The authors highlight the racist propaganda spread by Germany about black troops fighting for France in Europe, and racial discrimination by the Allies against their own indigenous soldiers. They follow the deadly effects of Germany's illegal submarine warfare and laying of mines in international waters as well as food shortages and economic devastation in places as distant as Latin America caused by Great Britain's illegal blockade, seizure of vessels and strangulation of maritime trade. The authors find no belligerents with clean hands, and they turn the tragedy of world war into its own indictment of the global grip of empires.

Ms. Churchill and Mr. Eberholst have smashed the confines of military history and expanded the visible scope of World War I's beginnings for us all. Thoroughly comprehensive and highly readable, "Ring of Fire" transports us to a world of people whose futures dangled from the whims of men steering empires into a global collision, and to a time when the war's length and outcome were not yet known. At the book's end, the French army and the British Expeditionary Force have pushed the German army back across the Marne. One German, after seeing a fellow soldier's brains splatter onto the ground in front of him, realizes he and so many others joined the fight believing the lie that the war "would turn machines into people again." Now soldiers like him have "only one thought: to get out of it."

By that point in the book, we have seen the tide turn in a war just beginning. And we are, like these young soldiers, glad mankind found a way out of it.

--Mr. Davenport is the author of "First Over There: The Attack on Cantigny, America's First Battle of World War I."

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