WWI made relevant in the retelling

Unknown Soldiers

The Story of the Missing of the First World War

Neil Hanson

Alfred A. Knopf: 476 pp., $28.95

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A World Undone

The Story of the Great War, 1914 to 1918

G.J. Meyer

Delacorte Press: 670 pp., $28

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AS stealthy and sure as the dust that permeated the Manhattan air from the pulverization of the World Trade Center in 2001, as lasting in human affairs as the radiation from Hiroshima, the telltale trails of the Great War -- World War I -- still haunt the consciousness of modern man.

The enormous size of the great blow that European civilization dealt to itself was not at first apparent to everyone, so annihilating was the explosion. It took years before the surviving world more fully integrated into its basic understanding of reality the terrible lessons of those unspeakable four years.

Men and women had to write books about it, create paintings of it, address it with various forms of art until it could come slowly and haltingly into view. New empires, their bases shaken, had to rise -- and fall. And the reaction -- appalled, barely comprehending -- to the millions of harmless and ordinary people who were consumed in that war, as in a field of grass on fire, became part of the common contemporary experience before the full extent of this vast and malevolent disaster could be felt.

The Great War has been better understood on the other side of the ocean than here. Without the United States it perhaps could not have ended as it did, but the United States was essentially at the edge of it. It would take one more world catastrophe to pull America to the center of events.

As it turned out, Americans probably know less, and most likely feel less deeply, than Europeans about the bloody explosion that blew the old order apart.

Two new books published 88 years after the armistice can help redress that imbalance. Each in its own way seems especially suited for the interested American reader.

“Unknown Soldiers” by Neil Hanson takes a merciless look at the unthinkable conditions of the static trench war in Northern France and Belgium, which gave a new, bottomless and hollow tone to the ancient phrase “human folly.”

“A World Undone” by G.J. Meyer is a skillful guide for readers, like many Americans, who are not steeped in the broad sweep or intricate details of the storm of fire. Neither author is an academic historian, but Meyer writes clearly and comprehensively about the complex four-year period as does Hanson on his share of it.

In “Unknown Soldiers,” Hanson, a writer who lives in England’s Yorkshire Dales, piles horror upon horror. The reader comes to understand that we are coming to take the suffering, the deaths of millions, for granted. That is the stunning power of this book. What yesterday was unthinkable in the fighters’ constricted world today is a fact of life.

Hanson uses three soldiers -- one Briton, Alec Reader; one German, Paul Hub; one American, George Seibold -- to tell his tale, drawing on their letters and the memories of families and friends. All were articulate, all decent. The body of none has been found. So at the end of the war the monuments in each belligerent nation to the unknown became their cenotaphs.

Hanson’s picture is a narrow one of unspeakable suffering. On Meyer’s vast canvas he displays the historical forces and the human leaders who took Europe and the world into the fiery furnace.

For Americans who are curious but only vaguely cognizant, Meyer’s sketches of the British Cabinet, the Russian Empire, the aging Austro-Hungarian Empire, the leaders of Prussia with their newly minted swagger, are lifelike and plausible. His account of the tragic folly of Gallipoli is masterful.

The ultimate horror comes through clearly in his pages. The Great War was both absolutely unnecessary and completely unavoidable. The rulers, and the ruling classes, of 19th century Europe had convinced themselves that their world was ordered for the best, its moral codes upheld by something they called Civilization, its behavior governed by equitable rules of conduct.

But, as Karl Marx and others pointed out, that is not the way it was. Capitalism was straining to break the bonds of feudalism, and socialism was growling in the background. Democracy and a more just society were just being born throughout the continent. It took further catastrophes, including a madness directed toward a whole people and another world war even greater in its extent and more punishing in its effect, to rearrange human affairs into a system that has been, for 60 years at least, more manageable and less susceptible to the madness of rulers.

“Unknown Soldiers” tells you vividly how it felt when the world, then believed to be on a firm foundation, began to stagger and crash. “A World Undone” tells you in thorough and somber tones how the great collapse came to be. It should go without saying that in 2006 each of these books has an instructive value that can scarcely be measured.

Anthony Day is a former editor of The Times editorial pages.