Just Finished Reading Fall of Giants by Ken Follett

During the last decade Ken Follett wrote a historical fiction trilogy titled Century...Fall of Giants, which dealt with World War I and the years preceding and following it, is the first volume. It features the lives of fictional Welsh, English, German, Russian and American families as they find themselves at the forefront of monumental events in history.  Class divisions and struggles for equal rights vie with the war drums, ignited to actual conflict after Austria-Hungary's Archduke Ferdinand is assassinated by a Serbian nationalist in Bosnia in June of 1914 and the different mutual aid treaties entangling the great European powers drag them all into open hostilities, starting with Austria's invasion of Serbia and then expanding into the German-Russian theater in the east and German's incursion into France through neutral Belgium in the west, leading to a lengthy, disastrous trench warfare stalemate in northeastern France and Belgium between the Allies (first France and Britain and then with the United States entering later) and the Germans.  Before all this the narrative focuses on the Welsh mining family of the Williams, with young Billy entering the mines following in his father's footsteps, with the two adamantly opposed to the owner that Billy's sister Ether works for, a privileged wealthy nobleman named Edward Fitzherbert. Fitz's sister Maude finds herself falling in love with Walter von Ulrich, a visiting German nobleman: not good for them with a war coming on!  Add to the mix the Russian orphaned brothers Lev and Gregori Peshkov and the American official Gus Dewar and you have the book's principal fictional characters, destined to play their own significant roles among real people of the times like Vladimir Lenin, King George V of England, Kaiser Wilhelm of Germany, Leon Trotsky, Alexander Kerensky, and US President Woodrow Wilson...to name a few of the most important.  From what I already knew about this time and its tumultuous events, I felt that once you filter out the fictional characters, the narrative accurately recounts what really happened.  The only problem I had with it was that I felt the author tended to gloss over the calamitous Spanish Flu outbreak of 1918-19, which actually killed more people worldwide than the war itself. Had Follett written this story in 2020 during this coronavirus pandemic, I wonder whether he might have emphasized that time's horrible pestilence more.  I thought his characters were very compelling and believable, each of them with their own virtues and faults...and also having to deal with the prevailing social and political winds of their own time.  I'm looking forward to beginning the next book in Follett's series, titled Winter of the World...