THE PITY OF WAR.

• Author: Cockburn, Andrew
• Position: Review

THE PITY OF WAR

by Naill Ferguson Basic Books, $30.00

ON THE EVIDENCE OF THE LATE George Vesel, of Carmel, California, one of the most influential people of the twentieth century was a teenage girl who lived in Sarajevo in 1914. Vesel, whom I interviewed in 1986, had been a close friend during his youth of Gavrilo Princip, who murdered the Austrian Archduke Ferdinand and his wife on June 28, 1914, thus precipitating a chain of events leading, sequentially, to the First World War, the Russian Revolution, the rise of Hitler, the Second World War, the Cold War, Vietnam, and so on. According to Vesel, Princip was motivated to perform the fateful deed (to which Vesel was an eyewitness) because his girlfriend had just dumped him.

Niall Ferguson, an English academic prodigy, has confined his research to documentary sources and has therefore missed this crucial data. Nevertheless, in a style of historiography more common in England than on this side of the Atlantic, he sets out to offer what he suggests are radically revisionist assessments of various aspects of the conflict. He energetically rebuts the notion that World War I was rendered inevitable by secret diplomacy and militarism, as the survivors of the ensuing slaughter commonly believed. Nor does he accept that the German leaders embarked on war in 1914 out of a sense of hubris, but rather because they felt weak and thought they could only get weaker as time went on. Other topics subjected to his exhaustive scrutiny include the effect of propaganda in keeping the war going, British and German economic management, German military prowess, morale on both sides, and the reason for Germany's sudden collapse.

Curiously, despite his stated conclusions, Ferguson makes a convincing case that secret diplomacy and militarism did actually play a vital role in escalating the clash into a world war. (If Britain had not joined in, ultimately dragging the United States with her, the conflict would have remained just another one of those European wars.) Neither the British public nor the majority of the ruling Liberal government felt any particular antipathy toward Germany. However, key officials in the British War Office, together with a clique at the Foreign Office, had been secretly negotiating with the French for years to send the British army to France if war broke out with Germany. Thus the British were committed. Why did they do this? Ferguson skates over the issue, but he does provide an...