Over the past few months I've spent some time reading books about the first world war. In part, this is just a part of my random walk through history; in part, I've been trying to understand why that era is such a comparative mystery to me. Viet Nam, World War II and the Civil War are, I think, "popular" wars in the American imagination. By contrast, World War I and the Korean War are not. (Then there are the other wars...the War of 1812, the Mexican-American War...which I suspect the average American could tell you nothing about.)
It strikes me as odd that such a major event could be so unknown. It seems to me that the last year of World War I represents the first good example of the United States flexing its political and military muscle on a global scale. This was the war where we assumed the mantle of protector of the Western democracies, and the one in which American troops tangled (for the only time in our history) with Soviet troops. It's not far-fetched, I think, to peg World War I as one of the major antecedents of the Cold War.
Perhaps this is just an artifact of the way US History is taught in the schools here. After all, our role in the "war to end wars" was comparatively minor. American troops and American industry were instrumental in ending the war, but we were late entrants to the conflict, after much high-minded posturing about not getting involved. And trench warfare lacks the glamour of tank warfare and amphibious invasions. With many US History courses dividing for terms at the Civil War, it's perhaps understandable that the "postwar" class rushes past the early part of the twentieth century (no longer "this century!") to get to World War II and later events.
John Keegan's The First World War aims to be a reasonably accessible one-volume account of the war, and, I think, it succeeds. It's a good starting point if, like most of us, your notions of the cause and course of that war are hazy. He does an excellent job of showing how a world apparently at peace, enjoying prosperity, was nevertheless plunged into war by the assassination of a relatively minor royal figure, the Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria. A network of treaties, both public and secret, and military contingency plans drew all of the major western powers into a conflict that, on the balance, none of them really wanted. Once started, the war had a terrible momentum of its own, even as the opposing armies collapsed into the senseless waste of life that characterized trench warfare in that era.
Keegan takes a broadly chronological approach to describing the war and its major battles, with side trips into such things as the war at sea and the peripheral conflicts in Africa (where, as you may know, the English, French, and Germans had all extended their colonial empires). His section on the Gallipoli campaign is excellent. He brings out both the origins of the invasion there (apparently Winston Churchill and his supporters were simply frustrated at the lack of progress on the western front and wanted to do something, anything, to regain the initiative in the war) to the horrible loss of life and subsequent impact on the Australian and New Zealand national consciousnesses (two-thirds of the Australians who went to the war became casualties, many on the beaches at Gallipoli).
Keegan concentrates mainly on the story of the war, rather than on drawing overarching conclusions. He is very good, though, at showing the human cost of this conflict, and in teasing apart some of the consequences of the lost generation of Europe's young men. If you just want an understandable outline of the entire war, start here.
Niall Ferguson's The Pity of War: Explaining World War I, on the other hand, is a book for the professional historian. I had actually started reading this book before Keegan's, but quickly realized that I did not have the background to even understand Ferguson's arguments. This is a work of historical revisionism; not in the discredited sense of denying Nazi atrocities, but in the sense of challenging accepted interpretations of the historical evidence. He sets out to reconsider some of the seminal questions of the historiography of World War I. These include:
Ferguson's approach is analytical, buttressed by many statistics. He trusts facts and figures much more than the interpretation of other historians, as is only proper in a revisionist work. Interestingly, he relies quite heavily on "counter-factual" questions in his analysis; for example, "What if the French army had failed to hold the Germans at the Marne which would have been understandable after the casualties it had already suffered?" By considering these counter-factual questions, Ferguson argues that the optimal choices were frequently not made by the combatants, even when they should have had enough information to do better.
The average reader will find this book quite heavy going, though. Ferguson assumes that you either have plenty of knowledge about the general shape of the history of the Western powers, or that you'll hunt down the parts you don't already know. A random example, from the chapter on empires and appeasement: "In April 1885, in the dying days of Gladstone's second ministry, an Anglo-Russian conflict threatened to break out following the Russian victory over the Afghan forces at Penjdeh." If you don't know who Gladstone is, or why the Russians would have been in Afghanistan in the late nineteenth century, you won't find the answers here. Perhaps the standard of historical knowledge is higher at Oxford, where Ferguson teaches, than it is here. Certainly I lack the background to fully appreciate his work, even after using Keegan's book as a remedial crash course in the basic facts of World War I.
Despite the slow going, though, I persevered with this book and on the whole was glad I did so. If nothing else, Ferguson's analysis shows that things are not as simple as one is led to believe by some historians. How, for example, can you reconcile the popular notion that the Germans were outnumbered and outfought throughout the war with the fact that all the way through mid-1918 the German army was much more successful at killing French and British soldiers than vice versa? Ferguson argues convincingly that the war was won not through the sheer might of Allied arms but through a collapse of morale at the highest levels of German military and political leadership.
By contrast with Ferguson's book, Byron Farwell's Over There: The United States in the Great War, 1917-1918, is very accessible. Farwell is not concerned with tracing the entire course of the war, but with showing the part that the United States played in it. His broad theme is that of "America coming of age" and he argues that American troops did in fact save the Allies in their hour of need, a proposition that I suspect Ferguson would challenge.
Despite his lack of historiographical sophistication, Farwell writes an enjoyable book. If you're not concerned with getting a full view of World War I, but just want a history book to relax with next to the fire, this is the one to pick up. Over There is a book of anecdotes and curious statistics. Farwell does a better job of conveying the feelings of America, the way life was during that period, the changes on the home front, than do writers who see the war in terms of political alliances and military strategy.
For example, it is from this book that you can get a flavor of the war in the air, a topic largely ignored by more "serious" historians (properly so; air power, while a romantic topic, really played very little part in the course of the war). The air war in World War I was a war of observation balloons as well as of airplanes, and the reality of the Balloon Corps is suggested by the tale of Lieutenant D.M. Reeves who, "while a student observer with the 7th Balloon Company, spent a total of only four hours in the air but during that time he was forced to make three parachute jumps and twice had his balloon burned." The statistics of the number of balloons and the number of men involved, while also present in this book, do not give as full a picture as the realization that this was hazardous duty and a technology that was rapidly becoming obsolete thanks to the increased efficiency of aircraft in destroying balloons.
Similar bits of the human face of the war are scattered throughout this book. There are the "Hello Girls", uniformed telephone operators recruited on an emergency basis to save the American army from the snarl of the French telephone system. There's the story of the making over of the American economy into a war machine, with the associated suspension of many basic civil rights, which is conveniently ignored by most people who see American Democracy as a lasting tradition. There's Captain Frank Williams, formerly a fast-draw performer and Montana sheriff, shooting four German soldiers before they could raise their rifles. Particularly interesting is the tale of the ill-fated and poorly-planned Allied expedition to Siberia, in which American Marines fought alongside a Czech force that had crossed the whole of Russia.
So, did I learn anything in my months-long saunter through the history of World War I? Certainly. You can't read 1300 pages of history and come away with nothing (or at least, I can't). Rather than a mystery, I can now begin to see the Great War as a bridge in my understanding of the evolution of modern society. The seeds of this war were in the European system of alliances and conflict that itself arose from earlier historical causes, and which I now understand better. In turn, it's clear that this war set the stage for both American globalism and World War II. The fabric of history is equally rich at all points, although our knowledge of it is not. Combining the overview from Keegan, the detail from Ferguson, and the spice from Farwell results in a view, however dim, of another era in which real people fought and died for what they believed in.