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.
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.
Max Boot is a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and the author of “Invisible Armies: An Epic History of Guerrilla Warfare From Ancient Times to the Present.”
