2019 marks the centennial of the Paris Peace Conference following the conclusion of ‘The War to End All Wars.’ This Armistice Day, it seems appropriate to take a long look back at the war and flawed peace that set the stage for the century’s remaining conflicts. The centennial of the Great War has brought renewed interest and focus on the causes, conduct, and consequences of the First World War. The entire generation that has any memory of this great conflict has passed and gone and all that we are left with are their words and deeds that slowly fade and transform into myth. Over the past few years a number of excellent books have been published on the First World War, and here are some of our favorites:
“The key decision-makers – kings, emperors, foreign ministers, ambassadors, military commanders and a host of lesser officials – walked towards danger in watchful, calculated steps. The outbreak of war was the culmination of chains of decisions made by political actors with conscious objectives, who were capable of a degree of self-reflection, acknowledged a range of options and formed the best judgements they could on the basis of the best information they had to hand. Nationalism, armaments, alliances and finance were all part of the story, but they can be made to carry real explanatory weight only if they can be seen to have shaped the decisions that – in combination – made war break out.”
“The key decision-makers – kings, emperors, foreign ministers, ambassadors, military commanders and a host of lesser officials – walked towards danger in watchful, calculated steps. The outbreak of war was the culmination of chains of decisions made by political actors with conscious objectives, who were capable of a degree of self-reflection, acknowledged a range of options and formed the best judgements they could on the basis of the best information they had to hand. Nationalism, armaments, alliances and finance were all part of the story, but they can be made to carry real explanatory weight only if they can be seen to have shaped the decisions that – in combination – made war break out.”
Everyone should read The Guns of August by Barbara Tuchman about the decisions and chain of events that followed the assisnation of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo. I’m currently rereading it after twenty years. However, of the more recent publications Christopher Clark’s The Sleepwalkers is a great place to start. It is an extremely relevant and thought provoking analysis of the circumstances prior to the First World War, meticulous in its accumulation of information. I love the author’s introduction and approach to the topic – mainly that the figures behind the July Crisis of 1914 acted within the limits of their experiences and circumstances.
What Clark does exceptionally well is demonstrate how the threads of plans, fears, and faulty ideas in international politics of the time spliced together to absolve the decision-makers of any responsibility for the catastrophe. Russia’s contribution to the calamity is central, the Balkan focus of the Great Power politics made the system unstable and volatile, while the Triple Entente refused to allow Austria-Hungary any reasonable room to maneuver in pursuit of its national interest. The First World War came as the unlikely culmination of rigid, narrow, and faulty thinking – by many people. It’s an excellent history with an impressive amount of thoroughness.
2 June 1915
“It is a curious thing, Field Marshall, that this war has produced no great generals” – UK Prime Minister H. H. Asquith
“No, Prime Minister, nor has it produced a statesman.’ Major General Henry Wilson, Sub Chief of Staff, British Expeditionary Force
The Great War was a tragedy of diplomacy and generalship. The Sleepwalkers addresses the former, while Allan Mallison’s book addresses the latter – albeit exclusively on the British side. While he touches on the relationship between the British government and its generals Mallison savages the military men that favored seniority over brilliance, petty jealousy over competence, and the bayonet over the bullet.
He doesn’t write alternative histories, but he does wonder out loud the direction a few different decisions would have taken the war. Chief among them is the decision to use the entire army in France rather than use the small force to train the millions they would eventually need. Or the shortsighted decision to empty staff officers from army headquarters to fill the British Expeditionary Force, leaving the desks left for developing strategy of a world war empty.
Too Important for the Generals asks the same questions that need asking as contemporary wars languish adrift from policy, rotating generals re-declare victory, and the world waits for this generations’ great statesmen.
“While it is obvious that none of the post-war violence can be explained without reference to the Great War, it might be more appropriate to view that conflict as the unintentional enabler of the social or national revolutions that were to shape Europe’s political, social and cultural agenda for decades to come. . . It was in this period that a particular deadly but ultimately conventional conflict between states – the First World War – gave way to an interconnected series of conflicts whose logic and purpose was much more dangerous.”
History is written by the victors . . . or so they say. However, what Robert Gerwarth does is flip that idea and explains how the inability to justify death, destruction, and sacrifice with victory shaped the “post-Great War” years of the defeated states. Without a victory to lean on, the defeated Central Powers redefined the logic of violence against civilians and the dehumanization of “enemies,” the belief in betrayal by fifth columns, and the rediscovery that violence and the threat of violence can bring political change for political minorities – see Fascists and Bolsheviks. Further exasperated by the collapse of the polyglot empires, national minorities fought to attain statehood and security in an undefined new world order – conflicts that would carve and recarve states over the following decades. It’s a tremendously well-researched book, engaging, and an important perspective on early Twentieth Century history – which I hope can influence both the waging of war and the making of peace in the Twenty First Century.
Andrew Zapf is a co-founder of Pushing Horizons.
Disclaimer: All views expressed are that of the author.
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