The Great War.

• Author: Howard, Michael
• Position: World War I

Mystery or Error?

IT IS ALMOST a century since the countdown to the First World War began, ominously enough, with a series of linked crises in the Balkans. Ten years hence publishers will start planning their first centennial histories. But apart from a gap in the 1940s and 1950s when the Second World War took priority, the flow of studies has barely ceased since 1918. Understandably: for Europeans, the war was uniquely horrifying both in its course and its consequences. In spite of the global title later bestowed on it, this was essentially a European war, and for two generations of Europeans it was simply the "Great War", tout court. Like earlier European wars it involved battles on and beyond the seas, but it was fought out on European territory and--apart from the brief but substantial American intervention in its final weeks--by European armies.

Above all it was for European peoples that the consequences were most devastating. Some thirteen million people died, nine million of them young men, most of them in conditions of almost unimaginable horror; the British in the mud of the Somme and Passchendaele, the French and Germans pounding each other to smithereens at Verdun, the Austrians and Hungarians freezing to death in the Carpathians, the Russians driven forward like cattle on the plains of Poland, the Italians slaughtered in their vain and repeated attacks on the rocky slopes of the Carso.

And for what? The victorious Allies exhausted themselves to no evident benefit, their sacrifices heartrendingly commemorated by monuments in every village throughout their lands. The empires that had kept Eastern and Central Europe in some kind of equilibrium for the previous two centuries--Hohenzollern, Habsburg, Romanov and Ottoman--disintegrated, leaving in their place nationalist and aggressive successor states whose quarrels still provide the seedbeds of further wars. The liberal capitalism of the Enlightenment, which in 1914 seemed to be inexorably expanding its benefits throughout the world, collapsed, and with it all the moral certainties it had seemed to embody. Peoples turned in despair to the comforting promises held out by communism and fascism. What had all those people died for? What had been the point?

Two leading British historians who have recently published major works on the First World War have recoiled, baffled by the question. Sir John Keegan, the doyen of military historians, can only conclude that the war was "a mystery." [1] For Niall Ferguson, the most promising of a younger generation of historians, it was simply "the greatest error in modern history." [2] Such judgments are hardly adequate. The war may have been tragic and disastrous, but there was nothing mysterious or inexplicable about it. It was certainly the result of cumulative "errors", that is, of bad judgments, but there were too many of them--the German decision to support the Austrian ultimatum to Serbia, the premature Russian order for general mobilization, above all the Schlieffen Plan, which extended the war willy-nilly to France and, through the invasion of Belgium, to Britain and the British Empire--to be considered a single "error." But for Ferguson the greatest "error" of all was the British decision to intervene in the war, rather than stand back and allow the Germans to win and establish a benevolent hegemony over Europe. It was this decision, he believes, that transformed a European war, which might well have been over within a year, into a prolonged confrontation that weakened where it did not destroy the whole fabric of European society.

Ferguson's revisionist judgment is provocative and interesting, and will be dealt with in a moment. It is certainly a refreshing variant on an otherwise sterile debate. In that debate there is, on the one hand, the traditional liberal thesis, popular between the wars both in Britain and the United States, and the German "war guilt" thesis, established by the victorious Allies at Versailles and revised by Fritz Fischer a generation later. The first maintained that the war was a ghastly "accident" resulting from the nature of capitalism, the prevalence of militarism, the "arms race", or the inflexibility of mobilization timetables (Barbara Tuchman's interpretation in The Guns of August, which, however mistaken, was to be of considerable value during the Cuban Missile Crisis). The second, however justifiable, was to have the disastrous consequence of outraging the entire German people and mobilizing them behind a revanchist policy in the interwar years.

NEITHER OF these theses is to be completely discounted, though historians, not least German historians, now give greater weight to the latter than to the former. But there is also a greater tendency to emphasize the European...