From Chapter One: A European Tragedy The First World War was a tragic and unnecessary conflict. Unnecessary because the train of events that led to its outbreak might have been broken at any point during the five weeks of crisis that preceded the first clash of arms, had prudence or common goodwill found a voice; tragic because the consequences of the first clash ended the lives of ten million human beings, tortured the emotional lives of millions more, destroyed the benevolent and optimistic culture of the European continent and left, when the guns at last fell silent four years later, a legacy of political rancour and racial hatred so intense that no explanation of the causes of the Second World War can stand without reference to those roots. The Second World War, five times more destructive of human life and incalculably more costly in material terms, was the direct outcome of the First. On 18 September 1922, Adolf Hitler, the demobilised front fighter, threw down a challenge to defeated Germany that he would realise seventeen years later: "It cannot be that two million Germans should have fallen in vain . . . No, we do not pardon, we demand--vengeance!" The monuments to the vengeance he took stand throughout the continent he devastated, in the reconstructed centres of his own German cities, flattened by the strategic bombing campaign that he provoked, and of those--Leningrad, Stalingrad, Warsaw, Rotterdam, London--that he himself laid waste. The derelict fortifications of the Atlantic Wall, built in the vain hope of holding his enemies at bay, are monuments to his desire for vengeance; so, too, are the decaying hutments of Auschwitz and the remnants of the obliterated extermination camps at Sobibor, Belzec and Treblinka. A child's shoe in the Polish dust, a scrap of rusting barbed wire, a residue of pulverised bone near the spot where the gas chambers worked, these are as much relics of the First as of the Second World War. They have their antecedents in the scraps of barbed wire that litter the fields where the trenches ran, filling the French air with the smell of rust on a damp morning, in the mildewed military leather a visitor finds under a hedgerow, in the verdigrised brass of a badge or button, corroded clips of ammunition and pockmarked shards of shell. They have their antecedents also in the anonymous remains still upturned today by farmers ploughing the bloodsoaked soil of the Somme--"I stop work at once. I have a great respect for your English dead"--just as the barely viewable film of bodies being heaped into the mass graves at Belsen in 1945 has its antecedents in the blurred footage of French soldiers stacking the cordwood of their dead comrades after the Second Battle of Champagne in 1915. The First World War inaugurated the manufacture of mass death that the Second brought to a pitiless consummation. There are more ceremonial monuments. Few French and British communities lack a memorial to the dead of the Second World War. There is one in my West Country village, a list of names carved at the foot of the funerary crucifix that stands at the crossroads. It is, however, an addition and an afterthought. The cross itself was raised to commemorate the young men who did not return from the First World War and their number is twice that of those killed in the Second. From a population of two hundred in 1914, W. Gray, A. Lapham, W. Newton, A. Norris, C. Penn, L. Penn and W. J. White, perhaps one in four of the village's men of military age, did not come back from the front. Theirs are names found in the church registers that go back to the sixteenth century. They survive in the village today. It is not difficult to see from the evidence that the Great War brought heartbreak on a scale never known since the settlement was established by the Anglo-Saxons before the Norman Conquest and, thankfully, has not been known since. The memorial cross is, the church apart, the only public monument the village possesses. It has its counterpart in every neighbouring village, in the county's towns, where the names multiply many times, and in the cathedral of the diocese at Salisbury. It has its counterpart, too, in every cathedral in France, in each of which will be seen a tablet bearing the inscription, "To the Glory of God and in memory of one million men of the British Empire who died in the Great War and of whom the greater number rest in France." Nearby, certainly, will stand a memorial to the locality's own dead, itself replicated in every surrounding town and village. France lost nearly two million in the Great War, two out of every nine men who marched away. They are often symbolised by the statue of a poilu , defiant in horizon blue, levelling a bayonet eastward at the German frontier. The list of names on the plinth is heartrendingly long, all the more heartrending because repetition of the same name testifies to more than one death, often several, in the same family. There are similar lists to be seen graven in stone in the towns and cities of most combatant nations of the Great War. Particularly poignant, I find, is the restrained classicism of the memorial to the cavalry division of the Veneto that stands beside the cathedral of Murano in the lagoon of Venice, bearing row after row of names of young men from the lowlands of the River Po who died in the harsh uplands of the Julian Alps. I am touched by the same emotion in the churches of Vienna where severe stone tablets recall the sacrifice of historic Habsburg regiments now almost forgotten to history. The Germans, who cannot decently mourn their four million dead of the Second World War, compromised as the Wehrmacht was by the atrocities of the Nazi state, found a materially, if not morally equivalent difficulty in arranging an appropriately symbolic expression of grief for their fallen of the First, since so many lay on foreign soil. The battlefields of the east were closed to them by the Bolshevik revolution, those of the west made at best grudgingly accessible for the retrieval and reburial of bodies. The French and the Belgians found little room in their hearts or in the national soil for the creation of German war cemeteries. Excerpted from The First World War by John Keegan All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
New York Times Review
| Thousands of miles to go? A World War I history (or two) can be an ideal companion. IN MY HOME STATE, California, we listen to audiobooks mostly while driving. When stuck in freeway traffic, I sometimes wonder whether the guy in my rearview mirror is secretly absorbed in "Harry Potter," or if the smiling woman in the next lane is hearing Mr. Darcy woo Elizabeth Bennet. When it comes to immersing yourself in the First World War by audio, however, you'll need more than a short commute. The war was very long, the books about it tend to be very long, and about this cataclysm that so thoroughly changed our world for the worse, surely you don't want to listen to merely one book? So I suggest you reserve this listening for some road trip of epic length, like that drive you've always wanted to take from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego, or from Rotterdam to Vladivostok. Here are some suggestions for the journey: Prelude to Catastrophe Start with one or two of the very good books about how this war began. After all, part of the tragedy is that it didn't have to happen. In the early summer of 1914, Europe was happily at peace. No country openly claimed another's territory. Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany and Czar Nicholas II of Russia had been on yachting holidays together. Ties between Germany and Britain were particularly close: Wilhelm had been at the deathbed of his grandmother Queen Victoria; more than 50,000 Germans were working in London or other British cities; and Germany was Britain's largest trading partner. In late June, British cruisers and battleships visited Germany's annual Elbe Regatta, where the Kaiser donned his uniform as an honorary British admiral. When the Royal Navy warships sailed for home, their commander sent a signal to his German counterpart: FRIENDS IN PAST AND FRIENDS FOREVER. And yet weeks later the Continent was in flames, and the slaughter on such a scale that 27,000 French soldiers were killed in a single day. The veteran journalist and military historian Max Hastings describes the day, Aug. 22, in his vivid "Catastrophe 1914": A great mass of French troops were disoriented in a heavy fog, then suddenly found themselves in the sights of German howitzers on a hilltop as the fog cleared. Gallant French charges, spurred on by drums and bugles, were useless in the face of machine-gun fire, and the cavalrymen's horses only made their riders more conspicuous. "The dead lay stacked like folding chairs," Hastings writes, "overlapping each other where they fell." Similar disaster struck colonial troops from Senegal and North Africa, one regiment led by a French officer who had advocated the use of "these primitives, for whom life counts so little and whose young blood flows so ardently, as if eager to be shed." It is hard to imagine a more engrossing panorama of this momentous year, although the audio rendition by the actor and former BBC news reader Simon Vance is slightly too tense and breathless for my taste. In his introduction, Hastings pays generous tribute to someone who covered much the same ground more than 50 years ago, Barbara Tuchman in "The Guns of August." Documents found since then have made Tuchman's diplomatic history slightly dated, but her portrait of foolhardiness and delusion as Europe slipped into war is unsurpassed. What were the Russians thinking, for example, when Grand Duke Nikolai Nikolaevich, who had never commanded men in battle, was appointed commander in chief? Considered in the grand duke's favor, however, was his magisterial height of 6 feet 6 inches, with "boots as tall as a horse's belly." The railway cars that housed his headquarters were built for ordinary mortals, and pieces of white paper were pasted over all doors to remind Nikolai to duck. In a later essay about the writing of history, Tuchman named this as her favorite visual detail in the book: "I was so charmed by the white paper fringe that I constructed a whole paragraph describing Russian headquarters at Baranovici in order to slip it in." (The grand duke, incidentally, let it be known that after-dinner conversation among members of the headquarters staff should be on topics not concerned with the war.) Anywhere you look, in these early months of fighting, there was madness in abundance. What were French generals thinking when they sent millions of infantrymen wearing bright red pantaloons, bright blue jackets and bright red caps off to face German snipers? What were the Germans thinking when they outfitted their soldiers with spiked helmets made not of metal but of leather? At a mere 15 CDs, the audio version of Tuchman makes a smaller pile than the 20 discs for Hastings. But it will still get you 19 hours and quite a few hundred miles along that drive. The narrator, Wanda McCaddon - who re- cords under the name Nadia May - is spirited but not melodramatic. Still, as a longtime admirer of Hichman, who was a native New Yorker, I confess that I wanted her reader to have an American accent rather than McCaddon's British one, elegant though it is. Margaret MacMillan's "The War That Ended Peace," with a sonorous but rather slow 32-hour narration by Richard Burnip, covers a longer time period than do Hastings and Tuchman, the entire decade and a half before the conflict began. MacMillan is an old-fashioned historian in the way she puts great stress on personal responsibility - but this is an appropriate perspective, I think, for a time when Europe's three remaining emperors wielded such enormous power. "Any explanation of how the Great War came must balance the great currents of the past with the human beings who bobbed along in them but who sometimes changed the direction of the flow." MacMillan's thumbnail portraits of some of those bobbing in the currents are a delight, and she happens to be the great-granddaughter of one of them, British Prime Minister David Lloyd George. WHOSE FAULT WAS THE WAR? There is enough blame for all to share: When leaders confidently ordered their armies to mobilize, neither side foresaw just how catastrophic the carnage would be. After it was over, the victorious Allies of course blamed Germany, exacting big reparations in the Versailles peace settlement. Then from the 1930s onward, revulsion at the war's vast toll led both historians and popular culture to pin responsibility on the Allies as well. Archival finds by the German scholar Fritz Fischer in the 1960s, however, led him to fault German expansionism. In recent years, the pendulum has swung in some new directions. David Fromkin's "Europe's Last Summer" focuses on Austria-Hungary's role (its artillery and Danube gunboats did, after all, fire the war's first shots); Christopher Clark's widely praised "The Sleepwalkers" puts considerable onus on Serbia as a rogue state with irredentist dreams; and Niall Ferguson's "The Pity of War" provocatively blames Britain for entering the conflict, even though it had not been attacked, and thereby turning a Continental war into a worldwide one. (Audio is not a good way to take in Ferguson's book, however, because of its many charts and graphs.) Now Sean McMeekin's "July 1914" points a finger at Russia and its waffling czar, its ambition to control the Bosporus, and its generals who wanted to avenge their humiliating defeat by Japan in 1905. Concentrating on the period before the actual fighting, McMeekin lacks some of the color - and horror - of Hastings and Hichman. The audio narration by Steve Coulter is matter-of-fact and bereft of theatrics, but perhaps that is suitable for a book primarily about diplomatic maneuvering. Armageddon in Full By now, at the midpoint of your drive - Panama? The Urals? - it's time to move beyond 1914 and into the nearly four years of fighting that followed. John Keegan's authoritative "The First World War" is a solid, balanced and reliable account by a man who spent his life writing military history (Keegan died in 2012) and teaching it to officer cadets at Sandhurst, the British equivalent of West Point. The book is enriched by his deep knowledge of wars past. For example, he compares the "novelty" of telephone lines allowing a World War I general to have his headquarters behind the front to Wellington's having to ride in sight of the enemy at Waterloo in order to know what was going on, as well as to the way technology in the Persian Gulf war of 1991 (which Keegan covered for The Daily Telegraph) allowed commanders to orchestrate land, sea and airstrikes from a great distance. Simon Prebble gives "The First World War" a brisk, fast-paced reading. However, the Keegan book I would recommend you listen to first is "The Face of Battle," his study of Agincourt, Waterloo and the Somme. These three crucial battles in British history were centuries apart but took place remarkably close to one another, in what today is northern France and Belgium. His evocation of the Somme, in 1916 - a vast bloodletting that was a victory for neither side - is particularly powerful. Surprisingly for someone on the political right who was a hawk about wars in his own time, Keegan is extremely sensitive to class privileges, pointing out that even today we know more about how some British regiments fared at the Somme than others, because those with less wealthy officers could not afford to commission detailed regimental histories. Compared with some of these behemoths, Norman Stone's compact, almost aphoristic "World War One: A Short History" is as a skiff to a battleship; you can almost listen to its some 150 pages of text - Prebble reading again - on a drive to pick up the groceries. But do you really want such a short account of such a long war? A more interesting book of Stone's is "The Eastern Front 1914-1917." No aspect of the war is more haunting than the meeting on these battlefields between the two regimes with double-headed eagles on their coats of arms, Imperial Russia and Austria-Hungary. Russian officers were promoted largely by seniority and connections at court; in Austria-Hungary, three-quarters of the officers were German speakers, but only one in four of the enlisted men, from a bewildering array of ethnic groups, even understood the language. Russia's illiterate peasant soldiers frequently chopped down roadside telegraph poles for cooking fuel. Exasperated signalers then had to send orders by radio, but had few code books, and so broadcast "in the clear" - to the delight of their enemies. Men died by the millions, and in the Carpathian Mountains, wolves gnawed on the bodies of the wounded. This clash of rickety empires epitomizes the senselessness of the war that left behind what Winston Churchill called a "crippled, broken world." That folly should underline a lesson we have painfully learned anew in recent years: Wars are seldom won as quickly as everyone expects, and almost always create far more problems than they solve. CATASTROPHE 1914 Europe Goes to War By Max Hastings Read by Simon Vance Blackstone Audio THE GUNS OF AUGUST By Barbara W. Tuchman Read by Nadia May Blackstone Audio THE WAR THAT ENDED PEACE The Road to 1914 By Margaret MacMillan Read by Richard Burnip Random House Audio THE PITY OF WAR Explaining World War I By Niall Ferguson Read by Graeme Malcolm Audible Studios JULY 1914 Countdown to War By Sean McMeekin Read by Steve Coulter Audible Studios THE FIRST WORLD WAR By John Keegan Read by Simon Prebble Random House Audio THE FACE OF BATTLE By John Keegan Read by Simon Vance Blackstone Audio WORLD WAR ONE A Short History By Norman Stone Read by Simon Prebble Audible Studios ADAM HOCHSCHILD'S most recent book is "To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918," available in both print and audio formats. |
Library Journal Review
| A noted historian's definitive account. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted. |
Publishers Weekly Review
| In a riveting narrative that puts diaries, letters and action reports to good use, British military historian Keegan (The Face of Battle, etc.) delivers a stunningly vivid history of the Great War. He is equally at easeÄand equally generous and sympatheticÄprobing the hearts and minds of lowly soldiers in the trenches or examining the thoughts and motivations of leaders (such as Joffre, Haig and Hindenburg) who directed the maelstrom. In the end, Keegan leaves us with a brilliant, panoramic portrait of an epic struggle that was at once noble and futile, world-shaking and pathetic. The war was unnecessary, Keegan writes, because the train of events that led to it could have been derailed at any time, "had prudence or common goodwill found a voice." And it was tragic, consigning 10 million to their graves, destroying "the benevolent and optimistic culture" of Europe and sowing the seeds of WWII. While Niall Ferguson's The Pity of War (Forecasts, Mar. 8) offers a revisionist, economic interpretation of the causes of WWI, Keegan stands impressively mute before the unanswerable question he poses: "Why did a prosperous continent, at the height of its success as a source and agent of global wealth and power and at one of the peaks of its intellectual and cultural achievement, choose to risk all it had won for itself and all it offered to the world in the lottery of a vicious and local internecine conflict?" Photos not seen by PW. 75,000-copy first printing; simultaneous Random House audio. (June) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved |
School Library Journal Review
| Gr 9 Up-John Keegan's account of the Great War for our generation. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted. |
CHOICE Review
| There has been a rebirth of interest in WW I recently, perhaps because of the realization, as the century ends, of the degree to which subsequent events grew from the consequences of those four terrible years. Keegan's aim is both to synthesize the literature and provide analysis and perspective for the general reader. A skilled practitioner of popular military history, he very largely succeeds. The book is smoothly written, and Keegan is not shy at passing judgment. Throughout, he maintains pace, balance, and a command of the wide range of secondary sources on which his narrative rests. Specialist military historians will probably dissent from his dismissive assessment of the tactical innovations on the Western Front, the subject of so much recent work. And it is curious that the great accomplishment of the British Army in the "last Hundred Days" gets so little notice from a British military historian. Nonetheless, Keegan's book is now the best starting place for students or general readers who want to begin to understand what remains, even by the 20th-century's generous standard, one of the most appalling of wars. R. A. Callahan; University of Delaware |
Booklist Review
| World War I is a cataclysm shrouded in "mystery," as Keegan aptly describes it. Renowned for a dozen superb military histories, he enhances his premier reputation with this volume. His analytic superiority separates Keegan from most other military historians (yet Barbara Tuchman may best him as a narrator in her classic The Guns of August, 1962). Here his skill, as with his previous subjects, results in one of the best books about the war. As we now know, World War I exploded out of the blue: many since 1914 have pointed at innumerable causes. Ranking high among them are the war plans prepared by military chiefs, most notoriously the one drafted by Germany's General Schlieffen, purporting to guarantee a lightning victory against the entente powers. The Schlieffen Plan, Keegan notes, contained two fatal flaws. The first was technical: Schlieffen himself could not resolve how to move on land the 200,000 troops he knew were necessary to envelop Paris. The second was strategic: it ignored possible British intervention. Nevertheless, the Schlieffen Plan was all the Germans had on the shelf in the event they faced a monumental diplomatic defeat, which they did following Russian mobilization on July 31, 1914, and the plan thus became, argues Keegan, "the most important official document of the last hundred years." The plan's failure initiated the second mystery of the war, the stubborn prosecution of trench battles. Most of Keegan's text is devoted to trench warfare, which hindsight reckons a quasi-criminal enterprise, and the generals ordering it have languished since in disreputable obscurity. What kept men and nations going? Why weren't generals more imaginative? Keegan's answers accord a nuanced assessment of the ghastliness of the front, incorporating both technical factors and the more elusive factors of morale and comradeship. The war still seems perplexing, but Keegan's first-rate history brings it closer to being understandable. (Reviewed March 15, 1999)0375400524Gilbert Taylor |
Kirkus Review
| In this sterling account of the tragic and unnecessary conflict that inaugurated a century of horror, British military historian Keegan (Fields of Battle: The Wars for North America, 1996, etc.) ranges from Olympian assessments of leaders to searing depictions of suffering common soldiers. The shattering effects of the 'war to end all wars' have been depicted unforgettably by novelists and poets such as Hemingway, Remarque, Owen, and Brooke, but seldom so memorably by historians. Keegan remedies that with a traditional strategy-and-tactics study that is also informed by deep personal feeling for the subject (his father, two uncles, and father-in-law all served and survived). He consistently underscores the war's body blow to civilization, noting not only its staggering casualty rates (e.g., two out of every nine French soldiers who went to war never came home) but the chaos that gave rise to totalitarianism afterward. Keegan's versatility is evident on every page. He excels equally in explaining how the best-laid strategies went awry, in measuring commanders' strengths and weaknesses, and in discussing how technology had not yet developed enough to enable effective communications between the front and the rear in battle. He points out the unusual tragedies resulting from the war, such as secluded rural establishments where disfigured veterans could take holidays together, as well as its numerous ironic consequences. He renders all of this in somber prose that often rises to eloquence. Here he dispatches British general Douglas Haig: 'On the Somme he had sent the flower of British youth to death or mutilation; at Passchendaele he had tipped the survivors into the slough of despond.' A narrative that yields insight at every turn on this near-endless stalemate, as well as serving as an object lesson on the dark mysteries that await even those best-prepared for war. (24 pages b&w photos, not seen; 15 maps) (First printing of 75,000) |
