1914-1918: The History of the First World War
by David Stevenson
Allen Lane £25 pp784

Popular belief that the first world war had been pointless started in the 1930s, and became widespread during the cold war. By the early 1960s, the musical romp Oh! What a Lovely War was having a field day satirising generals. Its anti-Establishment jibes leached into many of the captions of A J P Taylor’s 1963 book, The Illustrated History of the First World War.

A founder member of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, Taylor projected his own anxieties (about deterrents that did not deter, or catastrophes that came about through a combination of accident and technological momentum) on to the dimwitted statesmen of the railway age. In his perverse attempt to deny that great events have profound causes, Taylor wrote: “Nowhere was there conscious determination to provoke a war. Statesmen miscalculated. They used the instruments of bluff and threat which had proved effective on previous occasions. This time things went wrong. The deterrent on which they relied failed to deter; the statesmen became the prisoners of their own weapons. The great armies, accumulated to provide security and preserve the peace, carried the nations to war by their own weight.” Events unfolded, he argued, according to the iron logic of train timetables.

Meanwhile, the German historian Fritz Fischer was unsettling his countrymen with claims that Germany’s leaders had willed a Balkan war between Austria-Hungary and Serbia, blithely risking its escalation not just into a continental conflict with France and Russia, but also, through the invasion of Belgium, into a global conflagration involving Britain and its far-flung dominions. Fischer then produced a huge study of German war aims, which he claimed had been agreed, along with the intention to go to war, as long ago as the December 1912 “war council” (this contention no longer enjoys favour). Whereas Taylor claimed that the second world war, too, was the product of diplomatic miscalculation, Fischer argued forcefully that Germany had been responsible for both wars, the 1939-45 conflict merely being a continuation of its aggressive imperialism of 1914-18.

Since the 1960s, the great war has generated acres of literature, inspired by the release of new archives and the unprecedented shadow it has cast over the rest of the 20th century. The dog days of an English summer seem a good time to consider two new but strikingly different additions to this literature.

David Fromkin’s Europe’s Last Summer is less the elegy promised by its title than a slightly frenetic brief for the prosecution. The accused are Austria-Hungary and Germany — the former bent on crushing Serbia, lest, like Piedmont and Prussia in the previous century, it become a magnet for nationalist aspirations that would destroy the Habsburg empire, the latter (meaning Germany’s senior generals) bent on striking at the allies France and Russia before they achieved strategic superiority, even if it meant a war with Britain. Fromkin gives some excellent pen portraits of the principals, and uses quotations to deadly effect, as when the German kaiser, Wilhelm II, remarked of Serbia, “It is not a nation in the European sense, but a band of robbers!”, a view that prompts Fromkin to thoughts of present-day Afghanistan and 9/11.

David Stevenson’s sober and more academic tome, the most thorough account of the war human hand has yet assembled, contains virtually no direct quotation, whether from the main diplomatic or military protagonists, or from the vast number of diaries and letters that record the hell of the common soldiery. While he acknowledges that all the running in studies of the great war is being made at the interface between cultural and more traditional kinds of history, he makes scant use of literary sources. By ignoring the backgrounds of the key players, together with any biographical detail, he neglects the “unspoken assumptions” such as “dignity”, “duty”, “honour” or “prestige” that shaped their responses during the enveloping crisis.

Stevenson is strongest on diplomacy, arms and strategy, especially when describing armour plate, phosgene gas or shell fuses. The book is far too long on the war’s aftermath, and not long enough on the decades that preceded it. That does not detract from the judicious correctness of his analysis of the July-August crisis.

The Central Powers, Stevenson argues, “both made a decision to start a Balkan war and to accept the risk that it would escalate into a European one”. After the assassination of Franz Ferdinand and Sophie by Gavrilo Princip, Austria-Hungary could, he reasons, have settled for the diplomatic humiliation of Serbia rather than pushing towards an ultimatum that no state could accept. Germany’s paranoia about “encirclement” by Russia and France was the self- fulfilling product of its belligerent and erratic policies; there is no evidence whatsoever that anyone sought to attack it.

As German soldiers marched west, the prospect loomed, in less militarised societies, of the local postman wearing a pointy Prussian Pickelhaube. A hundred years before, at least in the Master and Commander version, English tars were inspired to fight by the terrifying prospect of guillotines in Piccadilly. So likewise, as Stevenson says, “the Allies’ central cause was neither trivial nor unworthy” but a defensive struggle against an autocracy whose atrocities were not restricted to the imaginations of Allied propagandists. When the two- minute silence takes place at the 11th hour on November 11, it is this rather than the war’s “pointlessness” that should be uppermost in our minds.

WAR, WHAT WAR?

In hindsight, the first world war might appear inevitable, but the coming of the conflict was not obvious in the spring and early summer of 1914. George V, for instance, was less exercised that June by a possible European conflagration than by the threat of civil war in Ireland. Relations with Germany had also been improving — just a year earlier, for instance, George V had been the guest of his first cousin Wilhelm II, for the wedding of the kaiser’s daughter.

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