Catastrophe 1914: Europe Goes to War

by Max Hastings

Hardcover, 2013

Status

Available

Call number

D511 .H37

Genres

Publication

Knopf (2013), Hardcover, 672 pages

Description

"From the acclaimed military historian, a new history of the outbreak of World War I: from the breakdown of diplomacy to the dramatic battles that occurred before the war bogged down in the trenches. World War I immediately evokes images of the trenches: grinding, halting battles that sacrificed millions of lives for no territory or visible gain. Yet the first months of the war, from the German invasion of Belgium to the Marne to Ypres, were utterly different, full of advances and retreats, tactical maneuvering, and significant gains and losses. In Catastrophe 1914, Max Hastings re-creates this dramatic year, from the diplomatic crisis to the fighting in Belgium and France on the Western front, and Serbia and Galicia to the east. He gives vivid accounts of the battles and frank assessments of generals and political leaders, and shows why it was inevitable that this first war among modern industrial nations could not produce a decisive victory, making a war of attrition inevitable. Throughout we encounter high officials and average soldiers, as well as civilians on the homefront, giving us a vivid portrait of how a continent became embroiled in a war that would change everything"--… (more)

User reviews

LibraryThing member wildbill

This is a recent volume published to coincide with the hundredth anniversary of the start of World War I. The author covers the period from July to Christmas of 1914. It is a good companion to Margaret McMillan's The Road That Ended Peace.
The book was interesting and informative. I think it was

more thorough than Guns of August but in my opinion Tuchman was a better writer. The author provides a great deal of detail and makes excellent use of primary sources. The primary sources include not only the writings of politicians and generals but also letters and journal entries from the soldiers in the trenches. In addition to the narrative sections the author provides extensive analysis laced with criticism of the decisions made by the leadership. Hastings has many opinions which stand out in contrast to the general wisdom regarding the events of the war.
A good example is his analysis of the start of the war. While Archduke Ferdinand was not popular with the leadership of Austria-Hungary they decided to use his assassination as an excuse to assert themselves and punish Serbia. When they turned to Germany for support they received a "blank check" to proceed against Serbia. From that point on there was going to be a war and the only question was who was going to be involved. The interlaced system of alliances between the European powers brought in Russia, France and Germany. Germany's decision to invade Belgium finalized England's decision to declare war on the side of France and Russia. The speech of Edward Grey to Parliament in favor of the declaration of war is a highlight of the book.
The author places great emphasis on the difference between the first months of the war and the trench warfare associated with World War I. The first months were a war of maneuver which had battles whose casualties were greater than the first day of the Battle of the Somme. The details of the early battles read like a fantastic horror story. Hundreds of thousands of men marching and fighting and marching some more. Human and animal corpses litter the landscape interspersed with wounded men. Artillery ruled the battlefield and caused greater numbers of casualties during this war than bullets for the first and only time.
While the Western Front is fairly well known the author's descriptions of the fighting between Austria-Hungary and Serbia and Russia are even more horrific. The Austro-Hungarian army was poorly equipped and full of units where the officers did not speak the same language as the troops. The troops were always short of ammunition and rations and surrendered in droves. Twice they invaded Serbia and twice they were pushed back into Bosnia. The author states that 62% of Serbians of military age were killed in the war.
Reading about the "gentlemen" in their elaborate offices make the decisions that started the war and then reading the results of those decisions was for me the true horror of the war. Industrialized warfare brought a new level of destruction and suffering that only a very few could even imagine.

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LibraryThing member john257hopper

This is a magnificent account of the run up to and first five months of the First World War. The author recounts in detail the sequence of events leading up to war from the point of view of all the major participants (including the Serbs). Once war breaks out, he also covers events on all the major

European fronts, again including Serbia, whose fight for survival involved the whole nation in a ferocious way that astonished the numerically far superior, but showy and complacent Austro-Hungarian army. This is a timely reminder that the war in Europe was not just about trenches in Belgium and northern France, though these, are of course, given due coverage. The author's headline conclusion is that, while there was incompetence, naivety and self-aggrandisement to varying degrees in all countries' leaderships, Germany bears by far the heaviest burden of guilt for having underwritten through its "blank cheque" Austria-Hungary's desire for a limited war to crush Serbia and being careless about the probability of such a war spreading more widely; and German war leaders had plans to develop German domination of the continent that could not reasonably be tolerated by other countries. It should not be forgotten that Germany was effectively a military dictatorship at this time, with the socialist-dominated Reichstag having little real power and no influence over defence or foreign policy, whereas Britain and France, for all their many faults, were functioning democracies.

In fact, I think, of all countries, Austria-Hungary bears the most responsibility, on the principle that the country that first provoked the war through its ultimatum to Serbia that was designed to be rejected, and then bombed Belgrade, is the first guilty party; though in the West, the revival of the Schlieffen Plan and the violation of Belgian neutrality point to German guilt, exacerbated by an overmighty military leadership and a vainglorious and possibly clinically insane Kaiser. Other countries, it might be argued, could have done more to try to stem the tide of events, though it is clear that once war became inevitable, British neutrality was not a viable option.

I learnt a great deal from this book and could write a very long review. Hastings is a superb writer of military history, giving equal coverage to the political and military dimensions, and also to the human perspective of the ordinary soldier and civilian (while pointing out that the human perspective of the sufferings in the trenches has often tended to cloud judgements about the war's aims and objectives). The maps are excellent, very detailed but clear, and there are some interesting photographs. Thoroughly recommended.

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LibraryThing member Schmerguls

This 2013 book gives three chapters to the leadup to the war in 1914 and 15 chapters telling of all the battles in 1914. Some of that account is tedious but much of what Hastings says is insightful and well-reasoned. There is no pro-British bias--in fact, Hastings is very critical of Sir John

French, the British general in charge of Britaqin's forces in France in 1914. Hastings concludes that it was necessary that Britain joined with France and Russia and that if it had not Germany would have won the war and that was a result that would not have been good..

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LibraryThing member Big_Bang_Gorilla

Being a history of the diplomacy which led to the outbreak of the First World War as well as the military campaigns of autumn 1914. The accounts of the military campaigns incorporate both command decisions and the soldiers' worm's-eye-views, as well as digressions into the home fronts, air war, and

naval actions. The author is an outstanding storyteller, with a fine gift for deploying anecdote and gently interjectiong his own opinions. Any book which attempts to cover so much ground is bound to be a doorstop, but this book could use somewhat more concision, easily achievable by a stricter limit on Hastings' sometimes excessive accumulation of examples and illustrative anecdotes. It's also possible to disagree with his old-fashioned assignment of nearly-exclusive blame for the outbreak of the war to the Central Powers; I'm much less certain than he is that Russia and Serbia were blameless. Nonetheless, this book is a great accomplishment, and it ranks up there with Barbara Tuchman's accounts of the subject as a readable, insightful treatment of one of history's most important events.

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LibraryThing member oparaxenos

This was an excellent book. Max Hastings tells the little-known story of the first months of World War I, without being distracted by what came after. His eye for detail is characteristically sharp (as it is in most of his military histories), thought I disagree with his conclusion that WWI was

worth fighting. Considering the decades of violence that followed the Armistice in 1918, one finds it hard to accept that there was not a decent alternative.

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LibraryThing member MichaelHodges

Catastrophe 1914: Europe Goes to War, by Max Hastings: Published November 2013.
A most readable tribute to the 20 million who died, most not knowing why.
Hastings enlivens the tale of the great diplomatic shambles resulting in the inter-related Mobilizations of 1914 and the ensuing military actions

throughout the remainder of 1914. The 563 pages do not pale. Clarity and good research prevails.
Yes Max is a Brit but he does not under play his criticism of the inept Army leadership and the ram shackled start-up of the small scaled British Expeditionary Force (BEF) that arrived in France within days of the German Invasion of Belgium and France. This force, if you can consider such a small contingent to be a “force” comprised 80,000 men in August 1914. Whereas the overall British fatalities overall in the period 1914-18 exceeded 800,000 men.
Hastings details the 1914 British actions at Mons, Le Cateau and Ypres. However the main thrust of this book is a detailed and fast moving account of the actions and in-actions of all the European Powers both big and small that led to the Great War and the failure of the unachievable German Schlieffen Invasion Plan. Actions on the Eastern front with Russia and Austria are also exceedingly well detailed with a fast pace.
The book is a masterpiece of scholarship and is well referenced with a list of 400 separate books and a thorough index extending to over 1800 subject listings. There are also 46 photographs and 23 maps. Unfortunately as always the black and white printed maps are hard to read. When will book publishers learn to supplement their books with on-line inter-active color graphics on the web?

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LibraryThing member mancmilhist

A good wide ranging solid account of the first year of World War 1 covering both the strategic view and the view of the men and women in the front lines. Also some myth busting of the early performance of the BEF.

It was good to see attention to the often over looked eastern front.

I found some of

the language Hastings uses a bit too smart for my liking. For example he keeps mentioning the German host when talking about the German armies. Maybe it's just me, but I found this quite irritating.

Nonetheless it's made me want to read more about the WW1 eastern front, for example I hadn't heard about the Siege of Przemyśl, the longest siege of WW1.

Can anyone recommend any books as I'm surprised to see no obvious books in english on Tannenberg?

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LibraryThing member VGAHarris

After a promising start becomes mired in grinding details about combat regiments and maneuvers. Loaded with quotes and footnotes, which detract from readability.

LibraryThing member jen.e.moore

Dense, with somewhat obtuse sentence structure, and not the focus I really wanted when I decided to pick up a WWI history. Back to the library it goes.

LibraryThing member Sullywriter

Excellent, leanly written chronicle of the opening months of the Great War. Hastings's perspective and interpretations often depart from those held by most contemporary historians but they are perceptive and cogently explained.

LibraryThing member vguy

just audio-read Max Hastings on 1914 and seen the tail-end of Huw Strachan's Docu on BBC. Most striking is how incompetent the Austrians were: flouncy uniforms, flashy medals, pompous titles, poor generalship and logistics, while the Serbians were viciously effective and had terrrain on their side.

In a historical if, I could see how the Austrians might have just got a bloody nose. pulled back to nurse it, maybe suffered a collapse of dynasty or so, while the rest of Europe just carried on in its own sweet Belle Epoque way. The Great War does seem like a random rather than a pre-ordained event (though there are those who argue that the clash between incumbent Britain and rising Germany was inevitable). Flash forward to Versailles and the botched peace. Clemenceau ( I think it was) predicts that war will come again within 20 years; he is out by a mere 65 days. Flash forward again and we see Germany as, after all that, the hegemon in Europe, though you might say the Germans are somewhat nicer people now. But I do get the feeling that we might have got here without several million lives going down the drain, and without giving Lenin his free train-ride.

. He has a capacity for zooming in on comments from individuals, both civilian and soldier which is impressive at first and certainly shows wide research. But I would have liked more on th e high level strategic goings-on. Detail upon detail starts to lose shape and feel a bit repetitive. As Stalin said" One death is a tragedy; a million is just a statistic".

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LibraryThing member cyderry

ABANDONED

This author must have either been writing his thesis or being paid by the syllable/name/stats that were used, because after 100 pages I'd had too many stats, too many miniscule details, and too many names which meant absolute nothing. Not only this, but he kept inserting his own comments

and opinions.

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LibraryThing member benuathanasia

Wow. The depth in this book is incredible. I believe I was two hours into the book before Franz Ferdinand was assassinated and halfway through the book before anyone even bothered declaring war.

This book explores many (just about *every*) views about entering into the war, staying out of it, what

it was like on every front from every perspective. There are hundreds of quotes from primary and secondary sources and the author early points out that he aimed to include more from the everyday soldiers and far less soundbites from the generals, the newspapers, and the politicians. The author accomplished this very well.

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LibraryThing member K.G.Budge

I've much enjoyed Hasting's writings on the Second World War, but as I commented in an earlier review, I think Hastings has largely wrapped up his writings on that conflict. Now he's moving on to World War I, but the writing is just as good.

As you might guess, the time period covered is 1914, from

the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand to the miserable trench warfare that became the pattern in the winter of 1914-1915. Hastings gives us the usual mix of background, strategy, analysis of leadership (or lack thereof), and oral history from all walks of society. He certainly still has an eye for the telling anecdote:

"One afternoon a crowd in the Bois de Boulogne gawked at an eagle wheeling high in the sky, and debated its significance. Was this a bronze symbol of Napoleon, or the family bird of the Hohenzollerns? Instead of either it proved to be a vulture, escaped from a zoo."

So whose fault was the war? According to Hastings, there's a lot of blame to go around (who has ever concluded otherwise?) but the worst villains were Serbia, whose secret service was almost certainly involved in the assassination (though probably not with the knowledge of the Cabinet) and who had ambitions of uniting all southeastern European Slavs into a single nation -- a Yugoslavia. Yep. And Austria, which presented Serbia with terms the Austrian leaders knew to be unacceptable. And Germany, for giving Austria a blank check, because the Germans were confident that if a general war broke out, they would win. Hastings is disinclined to fault Russia too much, and opines that the Tsar may have been as stupid as the Kaiser, but was much more conscientious within his limitations. France and Britain get assigned very little blame.

The opening battles get a lot of coverage, with more on the Eastern Front and Serbian Front than is typical in Western histories of the war. The Austrian commander, Conrad, was unbelievably incompetent, and while the Serbs suffered terribly, they inflicted worse than they got on the Austrians. Judging from Hasting's account, the Serbs were in fact the best warriors with some of the best commanders of the war. The problem was that they were too few and too poorly supplied. Hastings thinks the mass armies of France, Russia, and even Germany were not terribly capable, with Germany in particularly overrated. Moltke, the German commander, had a very poor grip on his subordinate commanders, while Foch's utter lack of imagination was more than made up for by his ability to keep his nerve. (One wonders if the one is the prerequisite for the other.)

Hastings tries to put the British contribution into proper perspective: If not microscopic in 1914, it was at least quite minor. The BEF was a tiny force compared with the armies of France, and Hastings bluntly calls Sir John French a poltroon. The BEF's contribution to the victory at the Marne was minor and belated. However, Hastings regards both of the British corps commanders, Smith-Dorrien and Haig, as reasonably competent men. But the old British Army died at Ypres (which Hastings covers at length), to be replaced with a new mass army.

Churchill gets some criticism, which was probably deserved. His notion of holding Antwerp was tragically unsound, and his enthusiasm for wild adventurous schemes was never more manifest. His decision to try to draw part of the High Seas Fleet out of Heligoland with a decoy force could and probably should have ended in disaster, but ended up being a minor British victory mostly because the subordinate commanders disobeyed their orders.

Hastings notes that the Battles of the Frontiers were bloodbaths. The worst day of the Battles had a larger French death toll than the oft-quoted death toll for the first day of the Somme offensive. The collapse into trench warfare was largely the result of complete exhaustion of the armies concerned and of running out of artillery ammunition.

On the eastern front, besides being clobbered by the Serbs, the Austrians got clobbered pretty regularly by the Russians. But since the Russians got clobbered pretty good by the Germans, mostly because they divided their force and permitted Ludendorf and Hindenberg to defeat them in detail, the Central Powers did not quite collapse in the East.

Civilian attitudes are about what they always are: Enthusiastic when one's side was winning, critical when one's side was losing or at least was losing a lot of casualties.

Hastings ends with some comments on the war as a whole. One gets the sense he is hoping to write more volumes to cover the entire conflict, but is not confident of having the time. He rejects the notion that the war was one of moral equivalence or of choice; he believes the West had to fight it and emphasizes that German atrocity stories were not just propaganda, citing modern research substantiating a lot of the stories, and comparing this with the much better record of France and Britain. He does not think much good would have come of German hegemony in Europe.

Two thumbs up.

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LibraryThing member ichadwick

Better even than Tuchman's Guns of August.

LibraryThing member citizencane

Catastrophe 1914 is one of the many books that were published on the occasion of the centenary of World War I, a horrific conflict that was the preliminary to the rise of totalitarianism in 20th century Europe that eventually resulted in World War II, the Cold War and the threat of mutually assured

destruction posed by the "atomic age" launched by the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. World War I is often explained as an accidental war that its participants drifted into as a consequence of the creation of competing security alliances, namely, the Triple Alliance (Germany, Austria-Hungary, Italy) and the Triple Entente (France, Russia, Great Britain). In this understanding the several autocrats, statesmen, and military leaders navigated their way through the crisis that erupted after the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in an ad hoc fashion due to poor internal and external communications and being dragged along by the exigencies of mobilization just in case a shooting war turned out to be the resolution of the crisis. Everyone was to blame, and no one was to blame.

Hastings does not buy the line that WWI was a mistake and a failure of diplomacy to forestall a colossal overreaction to the Archduke's assassination. The Hapsburg empire was, if anything, almost grateful for the excuse to crush Serbia which had only recently achieved independence and sought to make itself the center of a pan-Slav state that would, of necessity, pose a major threat to the shaky integrity of the empire. The Germans correctly assumed that an Austrian aggression against Serbia would draw Russia into a conflict with Austria-Hungary and in effect gave Austria a blank check to deal with Serbia as they saw fit. From the German perspective Russia posed the greatest long term existential threat to the German empire and settling with Russia sooner rather than later was a motivating factor in encouraging their Austrian allies to settle with Serbia given the provocation gifted to them by the Bosnian assassins. Thus, the Austrians issued the ultimatum that Serbia was bound to reject. Russia, the long term threat to Germany, was not in the short term able to conduct a mobilization of its army with the same dispatch as its adversaries and had to mobilize in advance of Germany, thus allowing the Germans the cover desired to avoid the appearance of being the aggressor.

Meanwhile, the French, with the largest army on the continent, mobilized to meet the anticipated attack in the West by Germany. The Germans began execution of the Schlieffen plan that called for offensive action through Belgium with the objective of a quick victory in the West, then pivoting to deal with the Russian enemy in the East. The Germans hoped that the Austrians would concentrate their forces to hold off the Russians in the meantime just as the Entente allies hoped that Russia would concentrate against the Germans. However, in the absence of any coordination among the members of the Alliance and the Entente, neither the Austrians nor the Russians followed the strategy desired by their respective allies. The British, who were extremely reluctant to get dragged into a land war on the continent finally were drawn by their treaty obligations to defend Belgian independence once the Germans violated Belgian neutrality.

So, in the end, Hastings rejects the various revisionist accounts and assigns blame for WWI to Austria-Hungary and Germany with Russia getting a secondary share of the blame based on its guarantees to Serbia and its total mobilization after the Austrian attack in Serbia. As far as the French and British were concerned neither were motivated to go to war to bail out the Serbs, but just as the Germans viewed Russia as a long term threat that needed to be dealt with before it developed into what might be called a clear and present danger, so the Western members of the Entente feared being eclipsed by the growing power of the German Empire.

Once hostilities commenced the Austrians were exposed as a sclerotic, poorly led 19th century military that had not kept up with the requirements of a 20th century mechanized war. They were expelled by the Serbs following the initial attack and suffered defeats by the Russians that necessitated German assistance to keep them from being knocked out early. In the meantime, initial Russian successes in East Prussia were undone to lack of coordination in the Russian high command that resulted in the disasters at Tannenberg and the Masurian Lakes, the suicide of General Samsonov whose army was routed at Tannenberg, and the retreat by the Russians across the border back into their own territory having lost over half of Samsonov's army of 230,000 men to death, wounds or capture. The Germans suffered "only" 12,000 causlties out of the 150,000 troops committed to battle by Hindenburg / Ludendorff.

Meanwhile in the West the French who had held back from any offensive against Germany proper, launched an attack to liberate Alsace and Lorraine, the provinces lost by France in 1870. Initial successes turned into disastrous failure and retreat back into France. In a three day span between the 20th and 23rd of August the French suffered 40,000 dead. By the 29th the French army had taken 260,000 casualties including 75,000 dead. Meanwhile, the British Expeditionary Force saw their first action in Begium at the Battle of Mons. Poor coordination between the British second corps commanded by Sir Horace Smith-Dorrien and the first corps led by Sir Douglas Haig resulted in a defeat and a retreat that prevented the second corps from being wiped out. As Hastings wryly noted the retreat from Mons was portrayed as a heroic event almost as if it was a British victory. Poor communications and coordination were endemic to all of the high commands in all of the armies in 1914.

Competent leadership was also in short supply across all of the combatants in 1914. The overall commander of the BEF, Sir John French, comes in for the harshest criticism for his reluctance to fight, placing blame for all his problems on the shortcomings of his French allies, and a refusal to support the French General Joffre that caused Herberrt Kitchener to be dispatched to Paris and meet with French ordering him to commit troops to support Joffre's line of defense. By the end of 1914 French had resigned and been replaced by Haig. Joffre meanwhile was not a brilliant strategist by any means but does get credit for stiffening the resolve of the army at the Battle of the Marne which pretty much ended any German hopes of achieving a quick victory, and ultimately caused the war in the West to devolve into the stalemate of trench warfare that was to last another four years. Hastings devotes entire chapters to famous battles such as the Marne and the first battle of Ypres that was fought in October-November of 1914. In these accounts he gives a day by day, blow by blow account of the fighting and relates the misery endured by troops on both sides quoting from their diaries, letters and memoirs. It makes for pitiful reading.

Meanwhile, on the home front, people are kept in the dark by their governments and press about the reality of the horror of the war. He relates an amusing anecdote about the reliability of the French newspapers in their reporting of the fate of the German Crown Prince who was serving as a commander in the field. "On 5 August he was the victim of an assassination attempt in Berlin; on the 15th seriously wounded on the French front and removed to hospital; on the 24th subject to another assassination attempt; on 4 September he committed suicide, though he was resurrected on 18 October to be wounded again; on the 20th his wife was watching over his death bed; but on 3 November he was certified insane. None of these stories contained the smallest element of truth."

Catastrophe 1914: Europe Goes to War is a deep dive into the first year of the first world war that is extremely well researched and well written and worth your time and effort. Not for the first time nor for the last it illustrates how easy it is to get into a war and how difficult it is to end it.

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LibraryThing member jbennett

Max Hastings does his successful combination of covering the high-level strategic decisions and movements with the feelings and experiences of the ordinary people.
As this covers a relatively short period (7 months from June - December 1914), I found some of the detail of the battles a bit much.

However, I know far more about the Eastern front and how the fluid first months became the static war with which we are so familiar.

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LibraryThing member nbmars

August 2014 will mark the one hundredth anniversary of the outbreak of World War I. It will probably also mark the onslaught of numerous additional books on the subject. Stealing a march on that inevitable blitz, Knopf has published Catastrophe, 1914: Europe Goes to War, by distinguished British

historian, Max Hastings. As he has done several times before (e.g. Inferno - about World War II), Hastings manages to take a well-covered subject and invest it with fresh energy and absorbing commentary.

In describing the events that led up to the outbreak of hostilities, Hastings observes that Archduke Francis Ferdinand’s assassins went to their graves denying any involvement by the Serbian government. Their execution of the plot was so amateurish that they may have been telling the truth. Hastings points out the irony that Austria used the assassination as a pretext to invade Serbia, risking war with Russia, even though the person killed to provide that excuse was the one man in the Austrian government committed to avert this precise eventuality.

Austria used the Archduke’s death as an excuse rather than a justification for war. Hastings paints a different picture from Chris Clark’s Sleepwalkers, which envisions the belligerents stumbling into the war through a series of accidents. Hastings thinks Germany was more than willing to go to war because (1) to wait would allow other countries, particularly Russia, to catch up with their military preparations; (2) they had had good success in using war as a natural means of exerting power; (3) they were paranoid about being surrounded by enemies; (4) a war and especially a triumph at war would halt the advance of the Socialists; (5) the retirement of Bismarck left governance in the hands of those who weren't as adept at executing it; and (6) the Kaiser was probably clinically insane. Germany knew the Russians would not allow Serbia to be dominated by Austria or Germany and that the French would come to Russia’s aid, but they underestimated their enemies’ strength and thought they would win the war. They also mistakenly thought that Britain was too involved in the problems with her own colonies to get involved with continental affairs. And importantly, Hastings notes, had no understanding of the strength that Germany had from its industrial growth; they only knew how to measure strength by military might.

Hastings says that it is a myth that most belligerents expected a short war or that Europe welcomed the conflict: “The war had not been precipitated by popular nationalistic fervour [sic], but by the decisions of tiny groups of individuals in seven governments.”

Once the fighting began, the armies were simply not prepared for the nature of the combat that evolved. For example, at the beginning of the war, all the belligerents were led into action by commanders armed with swords and mounted on chargers!

The British did not build on their existing “territorial army,” but rather created a “New Army,” composed of novices. As Hastings laments, their “immolation in France . . . make[s] a sorry story.”

Hastings is highly critical of some of the principle military leaders of the war. He blames Helmuth von Moltke, Chief of the German General Staff, for being instrumental in starting the war and criticizes him as an ineffective commander-in-chief who did not exercise sufficient control over his generals. [Many historians hold that Moltke, enamored of the possibilities presented the strategic outline of a possible war drawn up by his predecessor, Alfred Graf von Schlieffen, actually hurried Germany into the war. The Schlieffen Plan was an outline for how to win a possible future war with both France and Russia involving a thrust into Belgium followed by an envelopment of Paris.]

Hastings gives significant emphasis to the initial repulse by the French of the German advance through Belgium and the almost-encirclement of Paris. He avers: “It is hard to overstate the significance of Joffre’s triumph of the will over Moltke in determining the fate of Europe in 1914.” However, he claims that a French repulse of the Germans around Verdun in the east about the same time as the battle on the Marne was nearly as important.

Despite the success realized by the French, Hastings does not have much use for Robert Nivelle, who became “a brief and disastrous commander-in-chief later in the war” for the French army. Hastings contends that while the French fought with courage and determination, their will to fight was stiffened by draconian sanctions enforced by firing squads. Germans executed far fewer of their men than did the Allies. Moreover, France’s black soldiers suffered a death rate three times higher than the white soldiers.

On the British side, Hastings has little respect for Sir John French, Commander-in-Chief of the British Expeditionary Force, who he describes as “boundlessly foolish, childishly sullen.” But some of Hastings's most scathing criticism is reserved for one of Britain’s most cherished heroes. Winston Churchill came up with a crazy scheme to reinforce Antwerp with Royal Navy marines, who knew nothing of land war:

"…what took place represented shocking folly by a minister who abused his powers and betrayed his responsibilities. It is astonishing that the First Lords’s cabinet colleagues so readily forgave him for a lapse of judgment that would have destroyed most men’s careers.”

Although weapons technology in World War I had advanced, logistics had not; neither side could move its troops as quickly as needed. Nonetheless, although our perception of the Western Front is one of trench warfare, the first three months of the war was one of movement, with troops driven to exhaustion from constant shuttling, primarily by marching on foot.

But trench warfare has captured the imagery of World War I for good reason. Hastings devotes an entire chapter to the truly awful aspects of this style of battle. It amazes a modern reader to read the deprivations suffered by the vast majority of troops on the Western Front, detailed in the chapter aptly named “Mudlife.” By December 1914, it was clear to most of the participants that a stalemate had been reached. There was never a shortcut to victory. Hastings quotes George Orwell in explaining that the only way to end a war quickly is to lose it.

Unlike the war in the west, the war in the east was always a war of movement. Surprisingly, in light of what happened in the same area in World War II, the 1914 invasion of Prussia by Russia was characterized by humanity and restraint.

War in the air was new and glamorous, but exceedingly dangerous, primarily because the early airplanes were not reliable. For airmen, far more of them perished in accidents than from the enemy.

World War I also differed from previous wars in that throughout history, armies had been accustomed to fight battles that lasted a single day. But now, they had to cope with continuous engagement. Battles lasted for months rather than hours.

Hastings characterizes American military contribution to the war as only “marginal,” but he credits its entry in 1917 to exercising critical moral and industrial influence. But then, his book is only about 1914, not the entire war.

In conclusion, Hastings says it is a mistake to brand the 1914 rulers as “sleepwalkers.” He believes it is more appropriate to call them “deniers, who preferred to persist with supremely dangerous policies and strategies rather than accept the consequences of admitting the prospective implausibility, and retrospective failure, of these.”

Hastings also postulates that “the case still seems overwhelmingly strong that Germany bore principal blame.” Even if they did not actually bring the war about, they declined to restrain Austria, nor were they unwilling to jump in once hostilities began, because they believed they could through the war realize their ambitions for continental hegemony. If the allies had not won, Hastings emphasizes, European freedom, justice and democracy would have paid a dreadful forfeit. Thus, he reasons, those who gave their lives in the struggle did not perish for nothing, “save insofar as all sacrifice in all wars is just cause for lamentation.”

Evaluation: This is an excellent and very readable book by an erudite historian of warfare who is also superb writer. Hastings has unearthed many original sources such as letters from low ranking officers or literate subalterns to illustrate his general themes. While he breaks no new ground, his astute and compelling account of an extremely important period of history is worthy of attention.

(JAB)

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LibraryThing member charlie68

A comprehensive History of the First World War from the lead up to initial battles of 1914. Visiting all the fronts; Russian, Serbian, Western, Naval and elsewhere including perspectives of individual soldiers of all the combatants it becomes an enveloping read.

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