19 Sep 2013 04:43:41
These days, anniversaries come early. The centenary of the outbreak of the first world war is still a year off, but already we are knee-deep in books on the subject. So far they have come in three main varieties: lively portraits of the world avant le déluge by Florian Illies and Charles Emerson; new interpretations of how the disaster came about by Margaret MacMillan and Christopher Clark; and military narratives repackaged for a younger generation of readers. Max Hastings's Catastrophe goes one better, offering both the diplomatic build-up and an account of the first five months of the war. It's hardly surprising that historians keep returning to the war's origins. A century after the Serbian nationalist Gavrilo Princip assassinated the Austro-Hungarian Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie near the Latin Bridge in Sarajevo on 28 June 1914, we still don't really know why that single act of terrorism plunged Europe into a war that cost the lives of more than 15 million people and toppled four empires. Of course, the basic narrative has long been agreed. Austria, with the backing of her German ally, issued an ultimatum to Serbia; Russia came to the support of her little Slav neighbour; France was allied to Russia and Britain eventually joined in, after Germany invaded Belgium. But much about the motives, intentions and actions of the central players remains unclear. For many years the general view was that "we were all guilty" – that events and military timetables took over – but in the 1960s the German historian Fritz Fischer found archival evidence that the Kaiser's Germany was determined to go to war in 1914, before Russia could modernise her army; and had manipulated events (and her Austro-Hungarian ally) to that end; only then to discover that Britain, instead of remaining neutral, was coming in on the other side. This quickly became the consensus view.
But as times change so do judgments about the past: the end of the cold war, the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s and the 9/11 attack on New York have shifted perspectives. Last year, in The Sleepwalkers: How Europe went to War in 1914, the Cambridge historian Christopher Clark argued that Serbia was a rogue state whose government knew perfectly well what the assassin Princip was up to; that Austria was quite entitled to seek proper redress; and that, if the Germans were imperialistic and paranoid, so were the other nations. In fact, said Clark, it was pointless to treat the events of 1914 as an Agatha Christie mystery and go looking for a smoking gun, because none would ever be found. The whole blame game was futile. This return to the old "we were all guilty" line was buttressed with a wealth of archival evidence.
Max Hastings is having none of that. Like a colonel dealing with defeatist talk in the mess, he forcefully reasserts the thesis of German guilt in Catastrophe. His version is not always convincing – he has admitted elsewhere that "for most historians, the consequence of studying 1914 is to precipitate a brainstorm, because the evidence is so conflicting, the range of contradictory evidence so great" – but it is certainly very readable. Where Clark was out to convey the complexity of events and asked his readers to follow him patiently through a long diplomatic quadrille and many a Balkan imbroglio, Hastings keeps it simple and pacy. His rule of thumb is: when in doubt, blame the Kraut. And he doesn't stand for any nonsense about Britain not joining in, either. We had no choice, if the European balance of power was to be maintained.
And that's only the overture. Most of Catastrophe consists of a narrative of the war to the end of 1914, blending top-down and bottom-up testimony as in Hastings's books on the second world war. His account of the fighting on the eastern front draws on powerful and unfamiliar material from soldiers' letters and diaries found by his researchers in archives in Berlin, Moscow, Vienna, Belgrade and Ljubljana, but never quite builds into an authoritative text; many quotations, though rich and poignant, come across as disembodied soundbites. The problem is partly that the confused fighting in the east hardly lends itself to conventional military narrative; partly that Hastings has only a superficial knowledge of the peasant societies of eastern Europe from which the unwilling soldiery was mostly drawn.
By contrast, Catastrophe is magnificent on the western front. Never mind that this is a very familiar story – the Germans, following the Schlieffen plan, sweep through Belgium and northern France and, despite gallant British rearguard actions, seem to have victory in sight, only for the French generals, Joffre and Gallieni, to summon up the "miracle on the Marne" – Sir Max has retold it as well as any of his predecessors. Character, pace, sense of landscape, battlefield detail – all are superbly done. Hastings is particularly good on the sufferings of the French soldier, the logistical constraints that brought the German advance to a halt, and the frailties of British generalship – a lifetime of observing our princes and paladins has left him with scant respect for any of them. His description of Admiral Beatty as "a hero on the bridge and the chaise longue" is just one of many tongue-lashings. At times the Daily Mail columnist comes through, and the prose coarsens and the tone grows shrill, but overall it's a splendid read.
So, in a different way, is Saul David's 100 Days to Victory, which offers 100 snapshots of individual days during the war, including all the obvious set pieces – the first day of the Somme, the sinking of the Lusitania, the German offensive in March 1918 – plus a few surprises. A specialist in 19th century colonial wars and a fine writer, David has intelligently boiled down recent scholarship on the war by the likes of Hew Strachan, Gary Sheffield and David Stevenson. However, there's a trade-off. As Steven Spielberg found in Saving Private Ryan, if you start in the thick of it and plunge the reader straight into the action, you grab his attention but you also set yourself problems with character and back story. While the formula works well with simple episodes such as the arrest of Mata Hari, it struggles to contain the complexities of Verdun or the Somme. Some of the best material involves the experiences of David's relatives, but the only passage that reduced me to tears was, unsurprisingly, Vera Brittain's account of seeing her dead lover's bloodstained tunic after the blockheads at the war office had sent it back to his family.
Richard van Emden's Meeting the Enemy is a meticulously researched account of contacts between the British and Germans during the war, mainly in the trenches, but also as prisoners of war and as "enemy alien" wives. It is full of fascinating information and will appeal particularly to great war gluttons, the people who can't get enough of the stuff. I'd advise anyone who, by contrast, is coming fresh to the subject, to ignore all these books and stick to classics like Tuchman's August 1914, the great memoirs by Brittain, Junger, Sasssoon and Graves and the novels of Joseph Roth, Stefan Zweig and Ford Madox Ford.
