World War One: A Short History
By Norman Stone
(Basic Books, 240 pages, $25)
The pacifist’s preferred term for any war is “senseless,” but
more troubled observers would be hard-pressed to apply such a
judgment across the board. Even seemingly senseless wars are fought
over something in the end. World War I, or the Great War as it was
originally known, often seems as close to being about nothing as
any war can. Perhaps that’s because its various causes— nationalism
and empire and a dangerously embedded alliance system—don’t
resonate in contemporary minds in the way that ideas like
independence or emancipation or the fight against totalitarianism
do. It doesn’t help, either, that on further examination the war
seems inextricable from the idea of honor, another discredited
abstraction. Those who see the war as meaningless, though,
generally refer to its justifications, not to its results. The war
left an unholy litany of consequences, starting with millions dead
and winding like an intrepid virus through history’s immune system
ever since.
Norman Stone’s World War One: A Short History, makes
for a difficult reckoning because the book’s subtitle is so apt. In
fewer than 200 pages of text and seven chapters—one for each year
of the war, plus an introduction and conclusion—Stone breathlessly
subsumes so much history and scholarship that the general reader
(for whom, presumably, short histories are intended) may feel that
he’s missing the war. It raises the question of whether such
compressed accounts are the best guides for readers coming to
momentous subjects unacquainted. They tend to be written,
necessarily, in a kind of shorthand. Still, Stone is able to pack
an enormity of information into the smallest space, and with a
remarkable eye for detail. We see soldiers drowning in puddles at
Third Ypres in 1917, commonly known as the Battle of Passchendaele:
“Wounded men who had crawled into shell-holes for safety found that
the rain caused the water in them to rise and rise, so that they
could see their own deaths by drowning approaching, fractions of an
inch at a time.” We see the Italian general Luigi Cadorna, whose
disastrous character and judgment helped sink the Italians at
Caporetto, and who “even adopted the Roman practice of decimation,
shooting every tenth man at random in a regiment that had done
badly,” including a father of seven for being last man in formation
because he had overslept. We see Germans pushing lorries at Amiens
with wheels made of iron or wood because of a rubber shortage; the
wheels break up and damage the roads, slowing their progress.
The wonder is that Stone is able to create a narrative of this
sweep and brevity while also providing such evocative descriptions.
He excels as well at aphorisms, which tend to emerge suddenly out
of a thicket of detail. British general Sir Douglas Haig, in
command at the horrific Battle of the Somme, was “the best kind of
Scottish general, it was said, in that he killed the most
Englishmen.” And Stone isn’t all smoke and cannon. After relating
the bloodbath that was Verdun, he matter-of-factly concludes that
“in a sense it broke the French army, or at any rate strained it to
such a degree that the country never really recovered: France’s
last moment as a Great Power. When she did fall in 1940, this was
partly because her people did not want to go through Verdun
again.”
Except in his introductory and concluding chapters, Stone
focuses mostly on the decision-making and tactics of generals
rather than of political leaders. And as in most World War I
histories, they don’t fare terribly well. Stone cites C. S.
Forester’s postwar novel, The General, which described the western
front’s military leaders as “trying to hammer in a screw and, when
it resisted, trying to hammer it harder.” He saves most of his
praise for an eastern front general, Aleksei Brusilov, whose
Brusilov
Offensive constituted one of Russia’s few shining moments in the
war. He credits Brusilov with being among the first to understand
the need for new tactics, particularly the need to attack in
smaller units and hit strategic targets, especially enemy reserve
forces, simultaneously with assaults on the front lines. The
ever-hapless Russians failed to build upon Brusilov’s successes
during the rest of the war; the Germans, never missing a trick,
adopted them in due haste.
Stone’s devotion of nearly equal space to the fighting in the
western and eastern fronts might surprise general readers but not
those who know that his major work is the definitive The Eastern
Front 1914–1917, which he published in the 1970s. “The Russians
should have made it obsolete a long time ago,” he writes with
typical pungency in his source notes, which alone make the book
worthwhile. Unlike some recent historians of the war, like Hew
Strachan and John Keegan, Stone does not expound much on the war’s
sweeping, debilitating legacy. He does point out that “in four
years, the world went from 1870 to 1940,” referring to how military
technology—and modern medicine—made amazing leaps during the course
of the fighting (by the last year of the war, just 1 percent of
wounded men died.) And he notes crucially that at the war’s outset,
Western civilization stood at its high-water mark. It even had an
end-of-history-like tome to anchor its complacency, à la Francis
Fukuyama: Norman Angell’s 1910 book, Great Illusion, which argued
that the European powers had so much common economic interest that
the idea of war was unthinkable. Prosperity and comity had rendered
war obsolete.
Four years later, the West marched off to slaughter. We never
regained Angell’s optimism, and who can blame us? It’s been a slow,
steady, but relentless decline in purpose, conviction, and cultural
vigor. And now, with falling birth rates in Western nations,
cultural vigor is beside the point. The saddest part is that the
West, unprompted, chose to destroy itself, starting with this
miserable war. Perhaps even more than the horrific human cost, this
realization that the cataclysm was self-willed must have played a
role in stripping the West of its idea of itself and in time,
rendering so many of us dubious, ironist—and childless.
