O What a Lovely War
This is an apt moment to contemplate the vast and ultimately pointless slaughter that was World War I. Then, too, a bit of nastiness perpetrated by Serbian ultranationalists--a minor bit, by present-day standards--involving the murder of just two people, who happened to be the Hapsburg crown prince and his wife, provoked a mighty urge to punish. Nations all over the world suddenly realigned themselves into two opposing camps. Huge war machines, polished to perfection during the preceding decades of relative peace, rolled onto the field. Very quickly, the aims of the war, whatever exactly they may have been, were drowned out by the booming of artillery and obliterated in clouds of smoke and poison gas. In the end, the victors had lost more than a third of their young men, and the vanquished were seething for the revenge they would exact in World War II.
Niall Ferguson’s major point, in his massive work, “The Pity of War: Explaining World War I,” is that it did not have to happen. Contrary to the usual textbook explanation of the war, he argues that the European powers had been managing their imperialist division of the world quite agreeably, with minor exceptions like the Boer War. Nor, according to Ferguson, can the war be neatly blamed on the capitalists within the contending nations, who signaled their dismay at the outbreak of hostilities with plunging markets. Deep ethnic and cultural antipathies also can be dismissed as a causus belli: The royals of the contending parties composed one big Pan-European extended family, and two of them, England and Germany, even seemed to be engaged in a mutual love-fest on the eve of war, involving rich scholarly and cultural exchanges. What Ferguson offers instead is a story of diplomatic bumbling in which English Foreign Secretary Edward Grey’s passion for fly-fishing may have been more relevant, though Ferguson does not explain quite how, than the logic of militarism and imperialism.
This is a highly polemical, at times even combative book, so it would have been helpful if Ferguson had identified all of his intellectual antagonists and, better yet, given their arguments a little space. Outside of Lenin and a few other dogmatists, no serious scholar has claimed that the war was “inevitable” or that it had some single, precisely identifiable cause. The “causes” of any war are a tar pit of competing explanations--psychological, economic, political, strategic--all usually advanced with the absolute surety of hindsight. Tolstoy probably stated the problem best when he wrote that “the deeper we delve in search of these causes, the more of them we discover, and each single cause or series of causes appears to us equally valid in itself, and equally false by its insignificance compared to the magnitude of the event.” Ferguson does us a service by demolishing the high school multiple-choice approach to World War I, but he offers nothing to replace it.
Contrarianism is the closest thing he has to a methodology, and unfortunately for whatever case he is trying to make, it soon begins to infect the reader too. For example, after Ferguson dismisses the role of imperialist competition as a factor leading to war, one is startled to find him acknowledging, hundreds of pages later, that the Germans had had a “wish-list” of colonies they would have liked to have acquired from England and France. He challenges at length what he calls the “myth of war enthusiasm,” pointing out, for example, that the prewar German working class was anti-war and socialist and that the huge crowds that gathered to celebrate the onset of war were largely middle class. But whatever their composition, the crowds were undeniably there, and the working class quickly scuttled its noble vision of socialist internationalism for the intoxication of militant nationalism. At times, Ferguson even seems to acknowledge the enthusiasm for war that swept through Europe in 1914, admitting at one point that the war assumed a religious quality for the populations involved, as a kind of “crusade,” and quoting, without quibble, the American diplomat “Colonel” Edward House’s perception that Germany in the spring of 1914 was gripped by “jingoism run stark mad.”
But the worst tangle arises when he tries to dispose of the idea that the massive military buildup that preceded the war had anything to do with its outbreak. There is no denying the prewar arms race: In the two decades before the war, he tells us, Britain, France and Russia increased their defense expenditures by 57%; Germany and Austria by 160%. Further, despite his efforts to exonerate capitalism, he observes that a new “military-financial complex” had arisen within some of the belligerent nations. Germany was particularly itchy for combat, with Gen. Erich Ludendorff insisting in the years just before the war that his country was engaged in a “struggle for its survival” requiring it once again to become a “people in arms.”
Ferguson offers several reasons to doubt that the inter-European arms race was a probable cause of the war: First, because government spending in general was rising and not just the military chunk. Second, because Germany, apparently the most aggressive of the nations involved, acted chiefly out of a sense of weakness rather than strength, choosing to make war preemptively, before its potential enemies could grow stronger. “The paradoxical conclusion is that higher German military spending before July 1914--in other words, a more militaristic Germany--far from causing the First World War might have averted it.” Third, because, “as the experience of the Cold War shows,” arms races can be a deterrent rather than a stimulus to war. But he does not convincingly explain why the proportion, as opposed to the absolute amount, of military spending should be so decisive. As for the interpretation that Germany struck preemptively, fearing the other nations’ growing strength, this seems to argue that the arms race did indeed play a major role in priming that country for the fray. Finally, whatever case can be made for Cold War-style nuclear deterrence, it would hardly seem to apply to the era of conventional weaponry.
So we turn for enlightenment to “The First World War” by John Keegan, who is undoubtedly the world’s most accessible and popular military historian. His earlier books, like “The Face of Battle” and “The Face of Command,” rise well above “military history” to the level of genuine, all-purpose history, surveying the technology, the personalities and the sociology of war with brilliance and literary finesse. But his latest is a book that only a serious battle buff could love, weighed down by passages such as:
“The creation of this ‘mass of manoeuvre’ had been foreshadowed in Joffre’s General Instruction No. 2 of 25 August. Then he had said that it was to consist of VII Corps, of four Reserve divisions and perhaps another Active corps--By 1 September it consisted of VII and IV Corps, taken from First and Third Armies, and the 55th, 56th, 61st and 62nd Reserve Divisions, the whole forming Sixth Army--including the 45th Division, from Algeria, five Territorial Divisions, 83rd, 85th, 86th, 89th and 92nd.”
The reader will begin to feel she has wandered into one of Keegan’s old classes at Sandhurst, the British Royal Military Academy, and maybe that is what he intended--the ultimate World War I textbook.
If there is an underlying theme here--and Keegan has never been one to announce his themes with drumrolls or even topic sentences--it has to do with the emergence of planning or the notion that war can be visualized far in advance and pursued with scientific precision. By the late 1800s, he tells us, “a new era in military planning had begun,” featuring the creation of war colleges where young men were trained to play war games and make exact calculations of troop movements, by rail or foot. Thus, long before there were any clouds on the diplomatic horizon, a new elite of scientific warriors had already plotted the course of war to the day and to the kilometer. For them, the only question was when to begin. The Germans were obsessed with M-Tag, mobilization day, and the French planners believed, in 1914, that “every day’s delay in proclaiming general mobilisation entailed, as if by a law of nature, the surrender of twenty-five kilometres’ depth of national territory to the enemy.”
The most fateful of the plans hatched by the new military intelligentsia was the Schlieffen Plan for a German conquest of France via Belgium. Its author, the monomaniacal German Chief of Staff Alfred Graf von Schlieffen, whose idea of relaxation was to read military history aloud to his daughters, tinkered compulsively with his plan only to die, sadly enough, a little more than a year before it could be executed. As a plan of action, his had some remarkable gaps: In case the British decided to intervene from the north, Schlieffen advised only that the German troops should pause on their march through Belgium and defeat them. Nonetheless, the existence of the plan inspired the Germans with absolute confidence that when M-Tag finally dawned, they would know exactly where to go and how to get there.
Now neither war plans nor bloated militaries can “cause” wars all by themselves. The important factor, which Keegan stresses, and Ferguson glides over too quickly, was the radical decoupling of the military from the diplomatic and political ends of things. In the summer of 1914, while the kaiser and his cousin the tsar were exchanging reassuring notes on the need to avoid a conflagration, both sets of military brass were badgering their leaders to issue mobilization orders. The Russian Army Staff Chief Gen. Nicholas Yanushkevich even vowed, according to Ferguson, to “smash” his telephone lest the vacillating tsar decide to rescind his mobilization order. Once Russia had mobilized, the Germans felt they had no choice but to dust off the Schlieffen Plan and follow suit. The dogs of war may not have set the war in motion, but they had been straining at their leashes for decades and, at the first bumblings and wavering of the political leadership, broke loose.
On one thing there can be no dispute: the hideous folly of the fighting that followed. For all their scientific training, the military elites of the contending nations had very little idea of what modern warfare entailed. They imagined, for example, that battles could still be decided by cavalry and mobilized more than a million horses, each requiring heavy saddlery and fodder. (In a ridiculously aristocratic touch, the French cavalry rode to battle in scarlet trousers and brass helmets with long horsehair plumes, very much as they had under Napoleon.) Most tragically, no one seemed to have counted on the effect of the machine gun. As Europe’s military elites should have learned from the role of the Gatling gun in the American Civil War, charging into machine-gun fire gets you nowhere but dead. Yet again and again, for four years, the generals sent men out of their trenches to be mowed down by the tens and even hundreds of thousands per battle. Partly this was because the generals operated from comfortable quarters, well-stocked with fine food and champagne, far from the scenes of slaughter. And partly it was because, in some cases, they didn’t much care; Keegan mentions that the Russian high command thought of its peasant-based infantry as “cattle.”
Looking up from these monumentally exhaustive studies, one has to wonder what, if anything, the West has learned from the catastrophe of World War I. The NATO assault on Serbia has once again polarized the world into opposing camps. And why was NATO kept alive anyway, well after the disappearance of its raison d’e^tre unless, as Keegan’s account of World War I suggests, military machines do seem to require occasional wars to justify their existence? Or consider the persistently boneheaded military fondness for inappropriate and anachronistic methods, like the use of bombing as a solution to door-to-door ethnic cleansing on the ground. Here perhaps lies the real pity of World War I: that the deaths of more than 8 million men have yet to serve even a pedagogical function.