Uncertain origins, global consequences

If you find yourself in London anytime soon, stop at the Imperial War Museum. There, on the ground floor, is a vast permanent exhibit on the history of World War I, a conflict in which 745,000 soldiers from Britain gave their lives. Among the display cases filled with various weapons, maps, uniforms, mess kits, letters home to loved ones and, of course, the predictable dioramas of battles at the Somme, Ypres and Passchendaele, there is a small panel devoted to a lesser-known subplot of the war: the Mesopotamian campaign.

In November 1914, British forces began an invasion of what is today Iraq. Starting in Basra and fighting against Turkish troops from the Ottoman Empire, British forces slowly, with heavy losses, fought their way up the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, taking aim at towns that are now on the lips of all observers of the Middle East: Nasiriya, Kut, Baghdad, Fallouja, Tikrit, all the way to Kirkuk and Mosul. The Mesopotamian campaign was long and difficult; 27,600 British soldiers died in it. Eventually, Britain defeated the Turks and, after the war, found itself in control of a new state, which proved an unruly territory to govern.

After a decade of uneasy occupation, British troops departed, leaving King Faisal I, a pro-Western monarch, on the throne. British soldiers have since returned, alongside a much larger force of Americans, all of whom find themselves in an eerily similar predicament to those bedraggled Britons of 1915: isolated in hostile territory, unwanted, the target of attack. World War I is like that: Wherever you look across the map of today’s world, you find its footprints.

How is it possible that British lads, reinforced by Indian troops, could have found themselves fighting on the banks of the Tigris against Turkish soldiers in a war that started over the assassination of an Austrian archduke by a Serb nationalist in the Bosnian city of Sarajevo? The lines that connect these far-flung dots have fascinated -- and bedeviled -- generations of historians.

World War I defies easy explanation, and historians have come to distinctly differing interpretations over why it started and what the powers were fighting about in the first place. Many contemporaries latched onto the simple formulations offered by their leaders and the press: This was a war to end Prussian militarism, to stop the beastly Hun, to avenge neutral Belgium, to keep the seas open to trade and even, Woodrow Wilson would say in 1917, to make the world safe for democracy. Yet none of these aims was present in the minds of the men who led Europe to war in August 1914. Why then did the great powers go to war, and what did they hope to achieve?

David Fromkin, author of a much admired book on the effect of this war on the Middle East, and Hew Strachan, whose books include “The First World War: To Arms,” the first of a projected three-volume study, examine these important questions. Their answers do not differ markedly, but these two books are nonetheless worlds apart. Fromkin, who writes with ease and has always had a talent for portraiture, leavens “Europe’s Last Summer” with much drama, making this a fast-paced read. Yet his work is far too breezy for the complexity of the subject matter, and his research barely skims the surface of the available scholarship and sources.

Strachan, by contrast, is no stylist, but “The First World War” is a marvel of synthesis and is based on a lifetime of careful research on the subject. It appears there is nothing Strachan does not know about World War I; at times, he struggles to keep his mastery of detail from burdening the narrative of his concise overview.

It seems odd that, 90 years after the fateful guns of August first erupted, the origins of the war are still in dispute. Actually, few people today would disagree with the assertion that Germany bears principal responsibility for the war. Starting as far back as the 1930s, scholars such as Bernadotte Schmitt, Pierre Renouvin and Luigi Albertini found ample evidence to show that the German leadership had sought a war with Russia and its ally France to break what it saw as the encirclement of Germany by rival great powers and to assure Germany’s future status as the dominant power in central Europe. In the 1960s, the Hamburg historian Fritz Fischer published two books based on newly released documents confirming this view, further detailing the imperial ambitions of the German leadership. The case for German guilt seemed closed.

Historians are professional contrarians, however, and they have not all been reconciled to Fischer’s thesis. Some have said that Austria-Hungary bears chief blame because it was Vienna’s long-nourished determination to crush Serbia that led Austria to pick a war with the Serbs over the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand. This then triggered Russia’s backing of Serbia and Germany’s defense of Austria. Hence, a spreading war.

But then, why did Germany invade France? Here, military historians have placed blame on the inflexible war plans drawn up by the armies of the great powers, which all called for offensive actions against their neighbors in the event of a breakdown of diplomatic relations. The complexity of mobilizing these vast armies and getting them to the front required strict adherence to plans prepared well in advance. Germany, to wage war on Russia, sought first to deliver a swift knockout blow to Russia’s ally France and then turn its armies against the Eastern colossus.

Thus, as soon as Russia mobilized for war, German divisions invaded France and neutral Belgium. The violation of Belgium’s neutrality drew in Britain. The statesmen had ceded control to the warriors, and the war became a runaway train. In this view, the system of alliances and war plans was at fault, not individuals. Still other historians find the causes of war in long-term structural trends, such as increasing economic rivalries, the naval arms race, the emergence of nationalism and even the fin de siecle glorification of action, manliness and war. The possibilities seem endless.

In search of a villain, Fromkin returns to Fischer’s original thesis. He believes Germany is responsible for turning what should have been a local war between Serbia and Austria into a great world war. The vain, foolish and impressionable Kaiser Wilhelm II, though reluctant to go to war, failed to corral his headstrong military leaders, especially Helmuth von Moltke, who had been hoping for an excuse to make war on Russia and saw the Austrian crisis with Serbia as his chance to go for broke. Thus, the responsibility should rightly be placed at Germany’s feet. Fromkin makes his case clearly and lucidly.

Still, there is something irksome about Fromkin’s breathless prose, constantly promising new revelations and stunning reversals of the conventional wisdom. Fromkin’s conclusions, while sound, are hardly original, and the book depends entirely on the archival digging of other scholars. Yet the final section is titled “The Mystery Solved,” complete with a chapter in which Fromkin acts out a scene in a library, Hercule Poirot style, gathering the suspects before him and rendering a verdict. It might strike some readers as inappropriate to turn the origins of a war that led to the deaths of millions into a parlor game.

One could not accuse Strachan of levity. This serious, compact survey of the war’s history stands out as the most well-informed, accessible work available, superseding those by A.J.P. Taylor and John Keegan. The book, which grew out of a British Channel Four television documentary, is accompanied by superb photographs and maps. Strachan does not belabor the origins of the war, sensibly moving on to the more difficult problem: If the war was begun by a handful of German generals and a few Austrian nobles, why did so many millions of Europeans prove willing to fight and die in it, and why did it spread around the world so rapidly?

Strachan shows us that though the initial crisis that brought about the war may appear trivial -- the murder of Franz Ferdinand -- in fact each power felt it was fighting for its survival against enemies bent upon its destruction. And the postwar fate of the losers (the German, Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires were all broken up) shows that these fears were amply justified.

What makes Strachan’s book so good is that it balances the military narrative with the political and ideological history of the war. His battlefield accounts are succinct and precise. But he also insists on the importance of ideas, without which modern wars that rely on total mobilization of the nation cannot be fought. Britain and France were able to demand so much sacrifice from their people because they remained committed to the liberal ideals for which they fought. Of course, liberalism was put under great strain in the war: In Britain, the power of the state grew vastly, individual rights were curtailed, the army could censor the press and the mail and even try civilians in courts-martial.

But liberalism in Western Europe survived the war. In Germany, by contrast, the constitutional monarchy was supplanted by the army in the last year of the war and the country devolved into a military dictatorship under Gens. Hindenburg and Ludendorff. And in Russia, the people finally refused to continue to throw away their lives on behalf of a czar they disliked and whose regime could not feed or clothe its soldiers and workers. The result was revolution and an end to the czar. The Western powers won the war not only because they had better weapons and more materiel but because they fought for better ideas, the author asserts.

Strachan is also at pains to remind us that this war was not only a European affair but a global contest, with global consequences. In the Pacific, for example, the Japanese declared war on Germany to gobble up its colony of Tsingtao; Japanese imperialism in China rolled on unceasingly until 1945. The British and French fought the Germans across most of the African continent. More than 2 million Africans served in the war as soldiers and laborers.

And in the Middle East, the echoes of the Great War can still be heard. In November 1914, when Britain declared war on the Ottoman Empire, the Caliphate issued a jihad on the Allied powers. As the British soldiers made their slow, difficult passage up the Fertile Crescent, finally reaching Baghdad in 1917, they battled Muslim troops who had been promised martyrdom and eternal life in paradise if they died in battle against the infidels. In some places, World War I doesn’t seem to be distant history at all. *