How Did It All Happen?
‘The War That Ended Peace,’ by Margaret MacMillan
Mirko Ilic
By RICHARD ALDOUS
The New York Times Review of Books, October 25, 2013
THE WAR THAT ENDED PEACEPresident John F. Kennedy once remarked that “in 1914, with most of the world already plunged in war, Prince Bulow, the former German chancellor, said to the then-chancellor Bethmann-Hollweg: ‘How did it all happen?’ And Bethmann-Hollweg replied: ‘Ah, if only one knew.’ If this planet is ever ravaged by nuclear war,” Kennedy went on, “if the survivors of that devastation can then endure the fire, poison, chaos and catastrophe, I do not want one of those survivors to ask another, ‘How did it all happen?’ and to receive the incredible reply, ‘Ah, if only one knew.’ ”
The Road to 1914
By Margaret MacMillan
Illustrated. 739 pp. Random House. $35.
The anecdote about World War I came from Barbara Tuchman’s best-selling history “The Guns of August,” in which Tuchman explored the immediate origins and first weeks of the war. The book inspired Kennedy to install a tape system in the White House, including the Oval Office, to ensure an accurate record of decision-making. It was still on his mind as he confronted the Cuban missile crisis. “I am not,” the president told his brother Bobby, “going to follow a course which will allow anyone to write a comparable book about this time: ‘The Missiles of October.’ ”
Where Tuchman influenced President Kennedy and the popular imagination, Fritz Fischer, a year earlier, had become the touchstone for historians. His hugely controversial account, “Germany’s Aims in the First World War,” published in English in 1967, accused Germany of intentionally starting the war. Historians since have all weighed in on the blame game. Of recent scholarship, Max Hastings backs Fischer in holding Germany responsible; Sean McMeekin argues it was Russia’s fault; Niall Ferguson points the finger at Britain; while Christopher Clark shows Europe “sleepwalking” into war. Despite these bold and often compelling accounts, the case remains unsettled.
The scale of the disaster that followed the events of August 1914 complicates the historian’s task. “Loss of a generation” was a lament heard around Europe when the war was over. The conflict claimed 20 million military and civilian lives, with a further 21 million wounded. For some countries the burden was greater than others. While Britain, France and Germany lost between 2 and 3 percent of their total populations, Serbia suffered a staggering 15 percent depletion. Such losses had seemed unthinkable when the war began.
All of which is to say that anyone writing on 1914, particularly with the centenary approaching next year, better have nerves of steel. Margaret MacMillan, a Canadian historian at the University of Oxford, has already tackled contentious topics. Her excellent history of the Versailles peace conference, “Paris 1919,” forced us to rethink what was actually possible in the wake of so much death and upheaval. Now she turns from the consequences of the war to its origins, asking “how Europe reached the point in the summer of 1914 where war became more likely than peace. . . . Why, in other words, did the peace fail?”
One of the strengths of “The War That Ended Peace” is MacMillan’s ability to evoke the world at the beginning of the 20th century, when Europe had gone 85 years without a general war between the great powers. As she points out, “in 1900 Europeans had good reason to feel pleased with the recent past and confident about the future. The 30 years since 1870” — the Franco-Prussian War — “had brought an explosion in production and wealth and a transformation in society and the way people lived.” Food was better and cheaper. There had been dramatic advances in hygiene and medicine. Faster communications, including cheap public telegraphs, meant Europeans were more in touch with one another. “Given such power and such prosperity, given the evidence of so many advances in so many fields in the past century,” MacMillan asks, “why would Europe want to throw it all away?”
Her answer is that in the end the war came down to those individuals who made the key decisions. “It is easy to throw up one’s hands and say the Great War was inevitable,” she writes early on, “but that is dangerous thinking, especially in a time like our own which in some ways, not all, resembles that vanished world of the years before 1914.”
MacMillan’s portraits of the men who took Europe to war are superb. In one tragicomic moment, she describes the last meeting, at a royal wedding in Berlin in May 1913, between the imperial cousins who ruled Germany, Britain and Russia. The British king, George V, is unable to speak to Czar Nicholas II of Russia without Kaiser Wilhelm II spying on them. Later George suffers a harangue from Wilhelm about British alliances with “a decadent nation like France and a semi-barbarous nation like Russia.” The fact that the kaiser believed he had made a positive impression on the king shows just how off his judgment really was.
“The War That Ended Peace” neatly recounts the events that led to battle. On why it happened, though, MacMillan is more tentative. “While these have fascinated and will continue to fascinate historians and political scientists,” she writes of the various debates, “we may have to accept that there can never be a definitive answer, because for every argument there is a strong counter.” That may well be true, but most readers will want her to have tried, particularly given her success in doing something similar in “Paris 1919.”
Still, the logic of MacMillan’s argument is such that even now, as she leads us day by day, hour by hour through the aftermath of the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo on June 28, 1914, we expect some statesman or other to jump on the lighted fuse. The Russian czar begs his German cousin to help keep the peace. The kaiser and Bethmann-Hollweg momentarily get cold feet. The Hungarians, without whom the government in Vienna could not act, urge a settlement with Serbia. With the foreign secretary, Sir Edward Grey, ducking and diving, the British look to avoid fulfilling their Triple Entente obligations to France and Russia. Surely Europe will pull back from the brink. “There are always choices,” MacMillan keeps reminding us.
How limited these 1914 statesmen look in comparison with those who came before. The likes of Bismarck, Witte and Salisbury were not modest men, but they were figures of far better skill and judgment. In 1898 Lord Salisbury warned of “the difficult narrow line that separates an undue concession from that rashness which has, in more than one case in history, been the ruin of nations.”
Europe crossed that line in 1914. Margaret MacMillan may not provide an answer to “How did it all happen?” but she does tell a story in which individual temperament makes a difference. Perhaps that’s the meaning today’s leaders might take from “The War That Ended Peace.” As the 19th-century British prime minister George Canning stated: “Men are everything, measures comparatively nothing.”
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If Only One Knew
‘Catastrophe 1914,’ by Max Hastings
Mirko Ilic
By MAX BOOT
The New York Times Review of Books: October 25, 2013
CATASTROPHE 1914World War I continues to exert a powerful pull on the popular imagination, especially in Britain, France and Australia, which, although victorious, suffered much more heavily in the trenches than did the late-arriving Americans. (There is less appetite for remembrance in the states that lost — Germany, Austria, Russia, Turkey.) Its ravages formed a backdrop to the television series “Downton Abbey” and to the movie and play “War Horse,” and they are being recounted anew in a profusion of books tied to the war’s centenary next year.
Europe Goes to War
By Max Hastings
Illustrated. 628 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $35.
It is right and proper that World War I continues to be remembered not only for the scale of its suffering — still second only to World War II — but also for the breadth of its impact. Without the war, there very likely would have been no Nazi Germany and no Soviet Union. For lack of Russian support, there very likely would have been no Communist China either. Hitler, Stalin and Mao might have remained nonentities, and World War II, the Holocaust, the Korean War, the Vietnam War and the Cultural Revolution would never have occurred. More speculatively, even the Iraq war and today’s Syrian civil war might never have occurred, because Iraq and Syria, like most of their Middle East neighbors, were bastard offspring of the War to End All Wars.
Yet, for all its importance, World War I continues to be misunderstood by most ordinary people who have not yet caught up with the evolving consensus of historians. Three big myths, in particular, dominate the popular perception. First, that it was an accident, a war nobody wanted — a view immortalized in Barbara Tuchman’s beautifully written if factually questionable 1962 book “The Guns of August.” Second, that it didn’t really matter who won — that there was scant difference between the Central and Entente Powers. And third, that soldiers were needlessly sent to slaughter by unfeeling and cloddish generals — “lions led by donkeys” in the popular parlance.
In “Catastrophe 1914: Europe Goes to War,” the prolific British military historian Max Hastings does an excellent job of assembling a chronicle of the war’s first few months, from August to December 1914, that puts paid to all three perceptions, and especially the first two. He does not break new historiographical ground, but rather skillfully marshals evidence assembled by several generations of scholars into a highly readable narrative that should — but won’t — be the last word on the subject.
Start with the “accidental war” myth. It is true that no one could have foreseen a general European war breaking out because of the assassination of an Austrian archduke in Sarajevo, then part of the Hapsburg Empire. This murder set Europe on fire because Austria accused Serbia of complicity and made intolerable demands on Belgrade. Russia rallied to the side of its fellow Slavs and France to the side of its ally Russia, while Germany mobilized in support of Vienna. Britain was soon drawn in because of its alliance with France and its pledge to guarantee Belgium’s neutrality, which was violated when German armies attacked France. All sides, therefore, might be seen as equally to blame for the resulting conflagration, but Hastings, following in the footsteps of seminal historians like Fritz Fischer and Luigi Albertini, will have none of it.
“The case still seems overwhelmingly strong that Germany bore principal blame,” he writes. “Even if it did not conspire to bring war about, it declined to exercise its power to prevent the outbreak by restraining Austria. Even if Berlin did not seek to contrive a general European conflagration, it was willing for one, because it believed that it could win.”
Hastings is equally scathing, and justifiably so, in dismissing those who claim that the outcome of a German victory would have been benign, in effect creating a European Union a few years ahead of time. “Even if the kaiser’s regime cannot be equated with that of the Nazis,” he writes, “its policies could scarcely be characterized as enlightened.”
Although all sides were guilty of excesses, Hastings writes that the Western allies “behaved significantly better than did the Central Powers”: “No major massacres of civilians were ever laid at the door of the British, French or Italians to match those repeatedly committed by the Germans, Austrians and Turks.” Nor did the Western states impress slave laborers, as the Germans did with Belgian and French men in areas they occupied.
Given imperial Germany’s dismal track record, it is hard to be sanguine about what Europe would have looked like if dominated by a kaiser and his officers drunk on victory over their detested foes, whom, with the exception of the British, they saw as their racial inferiors. When denied victory, Germany’s military class subscribed to the illusion that they had been “stabbed in the back” by traitors on the home front. Reflections of Hitler’s deranged worldview, formed in large part during his service as a corporal on the Western Front, are not hard to see.
The third and final popular perception of the war — that the slaughter was the result of decisions made by stupid and unfeeling generals — has more truth to it than the other two, but in the final analysis, it is also mainly myth. Hastings is unsparing in criticizing the folly of generals of both sides. Helmuth von Moltke the Younger of Germany, Joseph Joffre of France and Sir John French of Britain come in for especial opprobrium. Moltke implemented the doomed Schlieffen plan, which called for delivering a knockout punch in the West by advancing through Belgium and northern France and instead resulted in a line of trenches running from Switzerland to the sea. Joffre implemented his equally ill-starred Plan XVII, which called for an advance into Alsace-Lorraine that distracted the French Army from the pivotal battles to the north. Sir John, for his part, panicked at the first whiff of trouble and had to be ordered by his superiors to cooperate with Britain’s allies in the Battle of the Marne, which stopped the German onslaught in early September 1914.
Yet Hastings also argues that it is unfair to blame the ineptitude of these generals for the horrible stalemate that took hold during the fall of 1914. This deadlock was almost inevitable given that the armies fighting one another were so closely matched in size and capabilities. Only after four years of war, by which time Germany had been exhausted and America had joined with Britain and France, would it be possible to end the impasse.
“There was never a credible shortcut,” Hastings concludes. For all the glamour associated with peripheral struggles in Africa and the Middle East, which produced heroes like Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck and T. E. Lawrence, the war’s outcome could be decided only in Western Europe and only after a prolonged period of mutual battering. “Catastrophe 1914” brilliantly shows how, within its first few months, World War I came to assume the dispiriting and bloody form it would hold for the next four years.
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