The War That Ended Peace: How Europe Abandoned Peace for the First World War, Margaret MacMillan, Profile Books, 2013, 699pp, £25 (hardback)
No Man’s Land: Writings from a World at War, Pete Ayrton, editor, Serpent’s Tail, 2014, 551pp, £25 (hardback)
‘Next come the Fab Four, the Moptop Mersey Marvels, and this is the bit I’ve been dreading. I mean, what is there possibly left to say on them?’ It might seem perverse to preface this review with the opening sentence of Nik Cohn’s chapter on The Beatles from his 1969 book, Pop From the Beginning.
A review of two books on the Great War should surely take as its opening remarks a reference to an apposite source: another study of the period, a literary perspective, a visual record, such as the British Pathe newsreel of ‘Bomb Damage in Bury St Edmunds,’ footage of the aftermath of the Zeppelin Raid over East Anglia in the spring of 1916, a new addition to the War’s terror.
Cohn’s words are apt, however, since the same sense of bewilderment greets many a student of 1914-18. Books and programmes on the subject are already legion, bearing out a particular truth: World War One is a tale that, simultaneously, demands to be told and fights to resist the telling. Now, historian Margaret MacMillan and anthologist Pete Ayrton add their voices – along with many others, from Kaiser Wilhelm to Andy Capp’s Czech cousin, the Good Soldier Švejk.
The War that Ended Peace obliges the reader to move at its own skilful pace. Much lies in the European hinterland of those fateful days at the end of July and start of August 1914: alliances, ethnic grievance, ambition – and strong, sometimes wayward personalities. Raymond Williams remarked on how, in any society, the plates are shifting all the time: sub-cultures rise, dominant cultures must find ever-different ways of renewing themselves or suffer decline. In wider political terms, these are the shifts that MacMillan presents as defining Europe in the opening decade of the twentieth-century. And, like all accomplished historians, she balances truth to uncertainty against the need for a sustaining narrative. The main story moves forward from 1900 to 1914, but the reader is always aware that there are other stories underneath and that it would only have taken a treaty signed here not there, a telegram sent not on Tuesday but on Thursday, for any one of them to rise and become what we now know as the lead-in to the Great War, possibly with changed dates, almost certainly with changed triggers.
MacMillan has to manage a cast of characters which would easily burst the combined dramatis personae lists of Shakespeare, and her business is with the nature of discrete events – who did and said what and who recorded what in their diaries – and how those events meshed together, losing in the process the character of signposts to different possible outcomes and instead becoming markers of the inevitable. But she is alive to the power of metaphor. Likening the principal players in the War to walkers on a bucolic route, she says,
They start out . . . on a broad and sunlit plain but they reach forks where they have to choose one or another. Though they may not realise the implications at the time, they find themselves passing through a valley which gets narrower and may not lead to where they want to go.
Where they want to go is, of course, the preservation of some kind of continental peace, ostensibly symbolised by the Paris Universal Exposition of 1900 – a time when, as MacMillan notes, it was inconceivable that any large-scale conflict could scar Europe. But the walkers’ route is increasingly complicated by international suspicion, the pressing demands of alliance (France and Russia, for example), the ailing political health of Austro-Hungary, and the restlessness of a relatively new country, Germany, suspicious of Britain and eager to mature as an empire as soon as possible. The route is narrowed further by what hindsight now construes as dry-runs for the grand finale: ‘the Bosnian Crisis of 1908, the second Morocco one in 1911 and the Balkan Wars of 1912 and 1913.’
One of the book’s many strengths, however, is that it does not dally with hindsight; rather, it places the reader in a position where, somehow, he or she both knows and does not know the eventual outcome. Chapter thirteen, for example, deals with the first Moroccan crisis, 1905-06, primarily France’s expansionist designs and Germany’s robust reaction. As throughout the study, MacMillan focuses the reader’s attention upon the details: allegation and counter-allegation, Morocco viewed as a localised conflict or the possible spur to a greater war. She does not, however, imply foregone conclusions. This is not a study which, contravening its subtitle, works insidiously back from the summer of 1914 while pretending to do the opposite. Hence the power of ‘Turning Out the Lights’, the final chapter proper, whose focus is those few unimaginable weeks during which, one after the other, the major powers reviewed plans, moved troops and then fully mobilised.
‘It’s the French Revolution all over again,’ says a patient in a TB clinic near Mont Blanc when war is declared. Private Pat McCullough lies among boulders and scrub after an Anzac assault on the Turks. Waiting for a convoy of the wounded somewhere in France, ambulance-driver Winifred Young inveighs against Mother and Mrs. Evans-Mawnington, two of the ferocious jingoists she has left behind her. Jaroslav Hasek’s Good Soldier Švejk ducks and dives as only he can: ‘Humbly report, sir, I’m a rheumatic, but I will serve his Imperial Majesty to my last drop of blood. I have swollen knees.’ As only he can, D. H. Lawrence discards particulars for essence: ‘The judgments of society were not valid to him. The accepted goodness of society was no longer goodness to him. In his soul he was cut off, and from his own isolated soul he would judge.’
These are some of the characters in the play for voices that is No Man’s Land: Writings from a World at War. A selection of excerpts from twenty combatant nations – from novels, memoirs, stories and journals – the anthology invites dipping into even as its unifying subject forbids it as an act of frivolity. It is best read in sequence, in short stretches, the better to sense the accumulation of viewpoints, moods and emotions from all of the increasingly battered territories of Europe, on and behind the front lines, as the War rolled on. Some of the voices will be familiar: Lawrence and the incorrigible Švejk, Vera Brittain and Erich Maria Remarque. Others are less so or hardly known at all, and, as so often with anthologies, it is the obscure voice that sometimes strikes deepest. In The Journal of a Disappointed Man, first published in 1917, the medically unfit W. N. P. Barbellion has understandable gorge-problems with the way that the War is stylised in the press: ‘Why call this shameful Filth by high-sounding phrases – as though it were a tragedy from Euripides?’ Elsewhere, ‘Infidels and Curs’ sees Vahan Totovents recalling his childhood memories of high tension between the Ottoman Turks and his native Armenia.
Attempts to understand the Great War are far from over. With their differing intentions, however, MacMillan and Ayrton offer two powerful ways of assessing the subject’s enormity – and intractability. So too does popular song. As the coming centennial years proceed, we, the beneficiaries of sacrifice, could do much worse than remember how much Tipperary once meant or how the whole battalion, from Quarter-bloke to C.O., ended their lives on the old barbed wire.