The First World War: A New History

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The First World War produced carnage of such scope and magnitude that it remains difficult to contemplate. As an American who has lived most of a 62-year life in the zone of Eastern states between Pennsylvania and North Carolina, I'm used to reading about Civil War battles -- 23,000 casualties at Antietam, 51,000 at Gettysburg. But with World War I, I find myself reading about battles that inflicted 300,000 casualties, or 500,000, and resulted in nothing more than a slight change in the battle lines. But we do this only by conveniently ignoring that it could easily have been France that fell prey to civil unrest, or Italy. Or even Britain for that matter. They did all revolt at some point after all — both their armies and their peoples. So it couldn’t have been democracy alone then? A century of almost unbroken European peace—unbroken, that is, by wars hugely destructive—had built up insensibly in men’s minds a consciousness of an unbounded general stability in the political as well as in the physical world. The crust of the political globe seemed to have caked, on the whole, almost as hard and cool as that of the elderly earth. It felt as if it were so firm that we could safely play the fool on it, as boys jump on the ice of a pond and defy it to break under them.

What I was saying earlier about Vera Brittain wanting people to learn from her experiences—something you see again and again in these newspapers is: some 19-year-old gets killed, and in his obituary, his friend or his brother is like, ‘no one will ever forget his death.’ I found that so upsetting. I mean, of course, you can’t remember everyone who died in a war for all eternity, but there was something so tragic to me about how forgotten those newspapers were, when they must have been so important when they were written. For instance, The Good Soldier: The Biography of Douglas Haig by Gary Mead has sought to re-evaluate the Field Marshal. Haig’s post-war reputation has inspired debate for decades. Mead seeks to separate myth from reality regarding Haig in his well-reviewed book. The second book on your list is To Arms (2001), volume one of Hew Strachan’s book The First World War. This is quite a big book.

Although Keegan does try to balance strategic explanations of the war with journals and other first-hand accounts, there is not nearly enough – for my tastes anyway – about the conditions soldiers served in, what they talked about, how they lived, what kind of social effects obtained in these countries during the war, how women and families coped while all the men in Europe were off shooting each other. It is quite a narrowly military approach. The First World War created the modern world. A conflict of unprecedented ferocity, it abruptly ended the relative peace and prosperity of the Victorian era, unleashing such demons of the twentieth century as mechanized warfare and mass death. It also helped to usher in the ideas that have shaped our times--modernism in the arts, new approaches to psychology and medicine, radical thoughts about economics and society--and in so doing shattered the faith in rationalism and liberalism that had prevailed in Europe since the Enlightenment. With The First World War, John Keegan, one of our most eminent military historians, fulfills a lifelong ambition to write the definitive account of the Great War for our generation. There are some people who are. There’s Rupert Brooke, ‘To turn, as swimmers into cleanness leaping, / Glad from a world grown old and cold and weary’: we’ve been living in this murky, unsure world we don’t really understand—in the Edwardian period there was a lot of social conflict—and suddenly the war makes everything simple and clear. We know who’s on our side. We know who we’re against and we know what to do. We’ve got a job to do that doesn’t involve us having to find a job. So there’s some of that. Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount.

A child's shoe in the Polish dust, a scrap of rusting barbed wire, a residue of pulverized bone near the spot where the gas chambers worked, these are as much relics of the First as of the Second World War. Technology: Keegan does slip a bit at times and tries to show the influence of communication technology (esp radio) and military technology (esp tanks) but again, hedges it by showing us how contingent that too is. The British were ahead of the Germans in tank-tech, but it was purely fortuitous. Neither were using radio tech on the ground. Again, this was not rally a technological limitation. Consider how within two years radio was everywhere, so were tanks.For most of the book I thought I liked it less than For Whom the Bell Tolls. I didn’t think it would place in my pantheon of novels-that-I-love. Then I read the ending. I’m not going to tell you much, but let me just say that the ending is one of the most spectacular pieces of writing. It’s mind-blowing. So, so good. And the writing is just… virtuosic. It’s like listening to Mozart. Incredible. I interviewed Professor Guy Cuthbertson about First World War poetry recently, and what really came through was that sense of ambivalence, even among those writers who were serving and decorated officers. The First World War came to serve as a cautionary tale for future generations. Image: Robert Graves' Good-bye to All That is a seminal autobiographical work detailing the author's frontline experiences.

Widely considered one of the finest analyses on WW1. You won’t find many quotes or first hand accounts of the soldiers here. But what you will find are excellent summaries and insights on the panoply of events that unfolded over the five years of the Great War. These tended to be reversed almost immediately. Any ‘turning points’ were just the winds of war, of morale - just as in The Iliad when war seems to turn at the urging of the gods giving morale to the men. What seemed decisive at the moment soon turned out to be just another exercise in stalemate. Nothing on the field seemed to decide how this stalemate could be broken. The really major shifts in fortune were usually due to events far from the battle-filed. Keegan covers campaigns like the Battle of the Marne in the war’s opening stages to its final moments in November 1918. He goes into more detail than Sir Michael Howard, making it an essential single-volume read. As well as Barbara Tuchman’s Guns of August, several significant works on the causes of World War One have been published over the years.

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War is a bit like other people’s marriages; it’s hard enough to understand even when you know all the facts. When you only know one side of the story, you have no chance.” There are also moments where you sense Keegan's own biases behind the facts; he seems a little too willing to get excited about the heroic Brits and it made me cautious of accepting some of his conclusions (‘Jutland was not a German victory’). Lazy comments about the ‘naturally warlike’ Serbs also eroded confidence. Perhaps the most famous works focussed on World War One for children were penned by renowned author Michael Morpurgo. The other major plot point is that they are in love with each other, but neither of them realises; they think it’s unrequited. And they aren’t able to communicate how they feel because it’s 1914. Anyway, they both end up at the front together, where the love story comes to a head because everything becomes so raw and intense. The question becomes not whether they love each other, but whether they will both survive. The book does not focus on heroics, but rather on the conditions in which a generation of young men found themselves when caught up in this horrendous conflict.

Image: Rebecca Smart's The Return of the Soldier was published in 1918 while the war was still raging Keegan’s war is not a grand Good vs Evil, or a Defense of Democracy/Civilization, or whatever else. The war continues to provide inspiration for writers from all literary spheres. From expressive imaginative poetry to in-depth biographies to children’s novels, new works appear every year.

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There will probably never be a singular best book to read covering the Great War. It’s simply too big a subject but it remains an interesting, beguiling, and enthralling topic for readers and writers alike. What is the best way to learn about WW1? Essentially, he says the world changes—or begins to change—with the performance of The Rite of Spring by Stravinsky in Paris in 1913. It’s an interesting thesis, but it’s wrong. You don’t have to be much of a cultural historian to know that modernism is often seen to pre-date that by quite a long way. People like Debussy and Baudelaire and Oscar Wilde are often seen as modernists in some sense. He also conflates modernism and modernity in a way that is not terribly helpful. He talks about this tiny coterie of avant-garde artists as if that’s what everyone in the country thought. That’s inevitably not true.