THE WAR THAT ENDED PEACE
The Road to 1914
Margaret MacMillan
Random House; 739 pages; $35
President John F Kennedy once remarked that "in 1914, with most of the world already plunged in war, Prince Bulow, the former German chancellor, said to the then-chancellor Bethmann-Hollweg: 'How did it all happen?' And Bethmann-Hollweg replied: 'Ah, if only one knew.' If this planet is ever ravaged by nuclear war," Kennedy went on, "if the survivors of that devastation can then endure the fire, poison, chaos and catastrophe, I do not want one of those survivors to ask another, 'How did it all happen?' and to receive the incredible reply, 'Ah, if only one knew.' "
The anecdote about World War I came from Barbara Tuchman's best-selling history The Guns of August, in which Tuchman explored the immediate origins and first weeks of the war. The book inspired Kennedy to install a tape system in the White House, including the Oval Office, to ensure an accurate record of decision-making. It was still on his mind as he confronted the Cuban missile crisis. "I am not," the president told his brother Bobby, "going to follow a course which will allow anyone to write a comparable book about this time: 'The Missiles of October.' "
Where Tuchman influenced President Kennedy and the popular imagination, Fritz Fischer, a year earlier, had become the touchstone for historians. His hugely controversial account, Germany's Aims in the First World War, published in English in 1967, accused Germany of intentionally starting the war. Historians since have all weighed in on the blame game. The scale of the disaster that followed the events of August 1914 complicates the historian's task. "Loss of a generation" was a lament heard around Europe when the war was over. The conflict claimed 20 million military and civilian lives, with a further 21 million wounded. For some countries the burden was greater than others. While Britain, France and Germany lost between two and three per cent of their total populations, Serbia suffered a staggering 15 per cent depletion.
All of which is to say that anyone writing on 1914 better have nerves of steel. Margaret MacMillan, a Canadian historian at the University of Oxford, has already tackled contentious topics. Her excellent history of the Versailles peace conference, Paris 1919, forced us to rethink what was actually possible in the wake of so much death and upheaval. Now she turns from the consequences of the war to its origins, asking "how Europe reached the point in the summer of 1914 where war became more likely than peace.... Why, in other words, did the peace fail?"
One of the strengths of The War That Ended Peace is Ms MacMillan's ability to evoke the world at the beginning of the 20th century, when Europe had gone 85 years without a general war between the great powers. As she points out, "in 1900 Europeans had good reason to feel pleased with the recent past and confident about the future. The 30 years since 1870" - the Franco-Prussian War - "had brought an explosion in production and wealth and a transformation in society and the way people lived." Food was better and cheaper. There had been dramatic advances in hygiene and medicine. Faster communications, including cheap public telegraphs, meant Europeans were more in touch with one another. "Given such power and such prosperity, given the evidence of so many advances in so many fields in the past century," she asks, "why would Europe want to throw it all away?"
Her answer is that in the end the war came down to those individuals who made the key decisions. Ms MacMillan's portraits of the men who took Europe to war are superb. In one tragicomic moment, she describes the last meeting, at a royal wedding in Berlin in May 1913, between the imperial cousins who ruled Germany, Britain and Russia. The British king, George V, is unable to speak to Czar Nicholas II of Russia without Kaiser Wilhelm II spying on them. Later George suffers a harangue from Wilhelm about British alliances with "a decadent nation like France and a semi-barbarous nation like Russia". The fact that the kaiser believed he had made a positive impression on the king shows just how off his judgement really was.
The War That Ended Peace neatly recounts the events that led to battle. On why it happened, though, Ms MacMillan is more tentative. "While these have fascinated and will continue to fascinate historians and political scientists," she writes of the various debates, "we may have to accept that there can never be a definitive answer, because for every argument there is a strong counter." That may be true, but most readers will want her to have tried.
Still, the logic of Ms MacMillan's argument is such that even now, as she leads us day by day, hour by hour through the aftermath of the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo on June 28, 1914, we expect some statesman or other to jump on the lighted fuse. The Russian czar begs his German cousin to help keep the peace. The kaiser and Bethmann-Hollweg momentarily get cold feet. The Hungarians, without whom the government in Vienna could not act, urge a settlement with Serbia. With the foreign secretary, Sir Edward Grey, ducking and diving, the British look to avoid fulfilling their Triple Entente obligations to France and Russia. Surely Europe will pull back from the brink. "There are always choices,"Ms MacMillan keeps reminding us.
Ms MacMillan may not provide an answer to "How did it all happen?" but she does tell a story in which individual temperament makes a difference. Perhaps that's the meaning today's leaders might take from The War That Ended Peace. As the 19th-century British prime minister George Canning stated: "Men are everything, measures comparatively nothing."
©2013 The New York Times News Service
The Road to 1914
Margaret MacMillan
Random House; 739 pages; $35
President John F Kennedy once remarked that "in 1914, with most of the world already plunged in war, Prince Bulow, the former German chancellor, said to the then-chancellor Bethmann-Hollweg: 'How did it all happen?' And Bethmann-Hollweg replied: 'Ah, if only one knew.' If this planet is ever ravaged by nuclear war," Kennedy went on, "if the survivors of that devastation can then endure the fire, poison, chaos and catastrophe, I do not want one of those survivors to ask another, 'How did it all happen?' and to receive the incredible reply, 'Ah, if only one knew.' "
The anecdote about World War I came from Barbara Tuchman's best-selling history The Guns of August, in which Tuchman explored the immediate origins and first weeks of the war. The book inspired Kennedy to install a tape system in the White House, including the Oval Office, to ensure an accurate record of decision-making. It was still on his mind as he confronted the Cuban missile crisis. "I am not," the president told his brother Bobby, "going to follow a course which will allow anyone to write a comparable book about this time: 'The Missiles of October.' "
Where Tuchman influenced President Kennedy and the popular imagination, Fritz Fischer, a year earlier, had become the touchstone for historians. His hugely controversial account, Germany's Aims in the First World War, published in English in 1967, accused Germany of intentionally starting the war. Historians since have all weighed in on the blame game. The scale of the disaster that followed the events of August 1914 complicates the historian's task. "Loss of a generation" was a lament heard around Europe when the war was over. The conflict claimed 20 million military and civilian lives, with a further 21 million wounded. For some countries the burden was greater than others. While Britain, France and Germany lost between two and three per cent of their total populations, Serbia suffered a staggering 15 per cent depletion.
All of which is to say that anyone writing on 1914 better have nerves of steel. Margaret MacMillan, a Canadian historian at the University of Oxford, has already tackled contentious topics. Her excellent history of the Versailles peace conference, Paris 1919, forced us to rethink what was actually possible in the wake of so much death and upheaval. Now she turns from the consequences of the war to its origins, asking "how Europe reached the point in the summer of 1914 where war became more likely than peace.... Why, in other words, did the peace fail?"
One of the strengths of The War That Ended Peace is Ms MacMillan's ability to evoke the world at the beginning of the 20th century, when Europe had gone 85 years without a general war between the great powers. As she points out, "in 1900 Europeans had good reason to feel pleased with the recent past and confident about the future. The 30 years since 1870" - the Franco-Prussian War - "had brought an explosion in production and wealth and a transformation in society and the way people lived." Food was better and cheaper. There had been dramatic advances in hygiene and medicine. Faster communications, including cheap public telegraphs, meant Europeans were more in touch with one another. "Given such power and such prosperity, given the evidence of so many advances in so many fields in the past century," she asks, "why would Europe want to throw it all away?"
Her answer is that in the end the war came down to those individuals who made the key decisions. Ms MacMillan's portraits of the men who took Europe to war are superb. In one tragicomic moment, she describes the last meeting, at a royal wedding in Berlin in May 1913, between the imperial cousins who ruled Germany, Britain and Russia. The British king, George V, is unable to speak to Czar Nicholas II of Russia without Kaiser Wilhelm II spying on them. Later George suffers a harangue from Wilhelm about British alliances with "a decadent nation like France and a semi-barbarous nation like Russia". The fact that the kaiser believed he had made a positive impression on the king shows just how off his judgement really was.
The War That Ended Peace neatly recounts the events that led to battle. On why it happened, though, Ms MacMillan is more tentative. "While these have fascinated and will continue to fascinate historians and political scientists," she writes of the various debates, "we may have to accept that there can never be a definitive answer, because for every argument there is a strong counter." That may be true, but most readers will want her to have tried.
Still, the logic of Ms MacMillan's argument is such that even now, as she leads us day by day, hour by hour through the aftermath of the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo on June 28, 1914, we expect some statesman or other to jump on the lighted fuse. The Russian czar begs his German cousin to help keep the peace. The kaiser and Bethmann-Hollweg momentarily get cold feet. The Hungarians, without whom the government in Vienna could not act, urge a settlement with Serbia. With the foreign secretary, Sir Edward Grey, ducking and diving, the British look to avoid fulfilling their Triple Entente obligations to France and Russia. Surely Europe will pull back from the brink. "There are always choices,"Ms MacMillan keeps reminding us.
Ms MacMillan may not provide an answer to "How did it all happen?" but she does tell a story in which individual temperament makes a difference. Perhaps that's the meaning today's leaders might take from The War That Ended Peace. As the 19th-century British prime minister George Canning stated: "Men are everything, measures comparatively nothing."
©2013 The New York Times News Service