Books reviewed (The Economist) : Still in the grip of the Great War

The first world war was the defining event of the 20th century. Thousands of books have been written about every aspect of it. More are on the way

The two heavyweights on the causes of the war are Margaret MacMillan with “The War that Ended Peace: How Europe Abandoned Peace for the First World War” (out last October) and Christopher Clark with “The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914” (published a year earlier). Both authors are academics: Ms MacMillan is warden of St Anthony’s, Oxford; Mr Clark professor of modern European history at Cambridge. The former is Canadian, the latter Australian. Both books run to nearly 700 pages, cover much of the same ground and have been critical and sales successes (especially “The Sleepwalkers”, which has sold 300,000 copies in 17 languages, including 160,000 copies in Germany).

WITH four months to go before the centenary of the start of the first world war, the bombardment of new books from competing historians is growing heavier. Unlike many of the young men who went off to fight in 1914, nobody thinks it will all be over by Christmas.
This is not surprising. The Great War has always been a publishing phenomenon. Around 25,000 books and scholarly articles have been written on it since 1918. The arguments have been conducted with forensic intensity and unwavering moral passion. The fascination with the war, which exerts its grip most powerfully in the “Anglosphere” countries, is justified. At least 10m men died in the conflict; more than twice that number were seriously injured. Those who bore mental scars for the remainder of their lives are uncounted, as are the civilians who died or who were damaged by bereavement or dislocation.

For the first time, but not the last, the organisation and technology of sophisticated industrial societies were seamlessly and lethally joined. The war destroyed empires (some quickly, some more slowly), created fractious new nation-states, gave a sense of identity to the British dominions, forced America to become a world power and led directly to Soviet communism, the rise of Hitler, the second world war and the Holocaust. The turmoil in the Middle East has its roots in the world it spawned. As Fritz Stern, a German-American historian, put it, the conflict was “the first calamity of the 20th century, the calamity from which all other calamities sprang”.

That still does not explain why interest in what caused the war and how it was fought is so much fiercer in Britain than in any of the four other main belligerent powers. It cannot be because of the appalling slaughter: France, Russia, Germany and Austria-Hungary all suffered far higher casualties than Britain’s 887,000 military deaths. Clearly it makes a difference that for the last three, the war ended in defeat. But there are other reasons too.

In Germany, the shadow of the second world war hung so heavily that there was little appetite to think much about the first, which was widely seen to have been no one nation’s sole responsibility. That changed in the early 1960s when a German historian, Fritz Fischer, caused a sensation by arguing that his country’s annexationist aims predated the Great War and were similar to those of the Nazis. Aspects of Fischer’s thesis were later disputed, but most Germans wearily came to accept its broad conclusions. For post-communist Russia, it is the heroism and sacrifice of the Great Patriotic War of 1941-45 that remain uppermost in the national psyche rather than the revolution that followed surrender in 1917. The Austro-Hungarian empire broke up, and the war means different things to its former constituent parts.

The two main victorious allies also differ in their attitudes to the war. France sees it much as Russia sees the last war, as an immense, tragic, noble endeavour that ended in the expulsion of the aggressor from the motherland through glorious force of arms (see article). The contrast with France’s capitulation in 1940 is stark.

For Britain, the second world war was the “good war”—not only devoid of moral complexity, but in other ways less painful too. Fewer than half as many British servicemen died in that war as in its predecessor. The rights and wrongs of Britain’s participation in the first world war were less clear—the pre-war British cabinet was split—and are still debated today.

However, once Britain decided to enter the war, all such doubts disappeared. Even as the casualties mounted, even as news reached home of that terrible day on the Somme in July 1916, when nearly 20,000 British soldiers (most of them recently recruited volunteers) were killed, popular support for what was seen as a just and necessary fight barely wavered. Some politicians, such as Winston Churchill and David Lloyd George (who became prime minister in December 1916), chafed at the attrition on the western front. But they were the exception. Amid the tragedy, a mood of dogged stoicism prevailed both at home and in the trenches. When the war ended suddenly, after the extraordinary “100 days” offensive that culminated in the armistice of November 1918, it was greeted as victory.

Yet a deep, and essentially pacifist, disillusion soon took a grip of Britain. As the stream of memoirs turned into a flood, dominated at first by the brilliant but partial accounts of Churchill and Lloyd George, the sense of waste increased. Douglas Haig, the British commander-in-chief, who was described by his American opposite number, John Pershing, as “the man who won the war”, was recast as the “butcher of the Somme”, a callous incompetent who had presided over more than 2m British casualties. Thus was born the first wave of revisionism about the war.

Foundations of appeasement
Doubts also grew about who was responsible. Although Germany never fully paid the reparations that had been demanded, chiefly by France, in the post-war Versailles treaty, many in Britain felt that they were too harsh. “The Economic Consequences of the Peace”, in which John Maynard Keynes, a British economist, criticised the treaty, became a worldwide bestseller and a handbook for the appeasement of “unfairly” treated Germany in the 1930s...
Read more:

See also





Rare First World War documents go online + Unseen photographs

Paul Fussell, ex-soldier, literary Scholar & critic

Book review: War Is Still a Racket


Book review - An Enduring Condition: On War Time

Eternal war (Chapter n+1) - Panetta’s Pacific Vision 

Albert Camus: 'Neither Victims nor Executioners'

'Military Inc' by Ayesha Siddiqa:

Shadow War: The Untold Story of Jihad in Kashmir by Arif Jamal

What war does to us: Afghanistan - a soldier's view
The End of the new world order


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