The great war retold.

• Author: Raico, Ralph
• Position: The Western Front: Battleground and Home Front in the First World War - Book Review

These are boom times for histories of World War I, which, like its sequel, though to a lesser degree, seems to be the war that never ends. Works keep appearing on issues once considered settled, such as the "Belgian atrocities" and the reputation of commanders such as Douglas Haig. Cambridge University Press recently published a collection of more than 500 pages on one of the most exhaustively examined subjects in the whole history of historical writing, the origins of World War I. In the past few years, at least six general works, by both academic and popular historians, have appeared in English. The Western Front: Battle Ground and Home Front in the First World War (New York: Palgrave, Macmillan, 2003) by Hunt Tooley, who teaches at Austin College in Texas, falls into the academic category, and for such a short volume (305 pages) it offers a great deal.

Tooley traces the roots of the world-historical catastrophe of 1914-18 to the Franco-Prussian War, which, though it achieved German unification in 1871, understandably fostered an enduring resentment in France, "a country that was accustomed to humiliating others during 400 years of warmaking and aggression" (p. 5). Bismarck sought to ensure the Second Reich's security through defensive treaties with the remaining continental powers (the ones with Austria-Hungary and Italy constituted the Triple Alliance). Under the new (and last) kaiser, Wilhelm II, however, the treaty with Russia was permitted to lapse, freeing Russia to ally with France. The British perceived the overambitious Wilhelm's extensive naval program as a mortal threat; starting in 1904, they developed an entente cordiale (cordial understanding) with France, which was enlarged in 1907 to include Russia. Now the Germans had good reason to fear a massive Einkreisung (encirclement).

A series of diplomatic crises increased tensions, aggravated by the two Balkan wars of 1912-13, from which a strong Serbia emerged, evidently aiming at the disintegration of the Habsburg monarchy. With Russia acting as Serbia's mentor and growing in power every year, military men in Vienna and Berlin reflected that if the great conflict was destined to come, then better sooner than later.

Tooley lays out this background clearly and faultlessly, but he points out that the period preceding the war was by no means one of unalloyed hostility among the European nations. Cooperation was also apparent, formally, through the Hague agreements of 1899 and 1907, encouraging arbitration of disputes and the amelioration of warfare, and, more important, through the vast informal network of international commerce, undergirded by what Tooley calls the "unique advantage" (p. 8) of the international gold standard. It was a time of remarkable prosperity and rising living standards, which, one might add, provoked the revisionist crisis in Marxist thought. Offsetting these gains were the steady growth of state apparatuses and the rise of protectionism and neomercantilism, providing a...