#35: The First World War, by John Keegan

History fans love the Civil War. Publishers feed the demand with an endless stream of volumes that minutely examine the careers of individual generals, or individual battles, or sometimes even individual generals at individual battles. Grown men devote their spare time to reliving it, right down to the itchy uniforms and the vile food.

Hardly anybody today can name the heroes or villains of the First World War. Its major battles have an almost convulsive quality, its soldiers could almost be white blood cells or army ants flying into battle and dying by the millions for no apparent reason. The essential realities that everyone knows are few: trenches, barbed wire, death.

The war was a global affliction, and after it ended, the world was a gloomier, more dangerous place. Resentments lingered. The fond notion nourished throughout the 19th century, that mankind was becoming more civilized, less warlike, less irrational, never quite recovered. The war left the world damaged, broken, an open wound that bred infections like Josef Stalin and Adolph Hitler.

There were massive, monstrous battles in the First World War—the Somme, Verdun, Ypres. They all followed the same script:

1. Attacking army bombards enemy position.
2. Attacking army follows up bombardment with infantry attack, swarming out of its trenches and overrunning enemy trenches.
3. Infantry attack gains ground, makes a breakthrough—sometimes a few hundred yards, sometimes a few dozen miles.
4. Defending army rallies reinforcements, converges on the breakthrough.
5. Defending army repulses attacking army, lines reform, new trenches are dug.

In the interim, a couple of hundred thousand soldiers died. This scenario played itself out over and over again. After a few years of this, the soldiers stopped cooperating. The entire French army pretty much took 1917 off, though they rallied in 1918 to repulse the final, desperate German assault. The Russian empire collapsed entirely, giving us the world’s first communist state. The Austrians, well, they had the best uniforms, one for each of the ten nationalities that made up Franz Josef’s conglomerate empire. Not much of a resumé in battle, however.

The most interesting events were at the fringes—after 1917, Russian and Central Asia were wide open, with Bolsheviks, anti-Bolsheviks, allied forces, and captured Austro-Hungarian forces all in play. The Austro-Hungarian forces, once the central leadership collapsed, quickly transformed themselves into nationalist forces and generally switched sides and threw in their lot with England and France. An army of 40000 Czech soldiers declared their alliance with the western forces, but declined to engage with German armies in the east. Instead, finding themselves now behind enemy lines, they decided to get on the Trans Siberian Railroad, travel five thousand miles to the Pacific Coast, take ship there, and come around the globe to fight on the western front. For a time they controlled the entire Trans Siberian Railroad, making it difficult for actual Russian armies to get at each other. They didn’t reach the Pacific until September 1920, almost two years after the war ended. Their plan seems very wise in retrospect.

John Keegan’s The First World War is a serviceable volume. He does what he can with the material. In the aggregate, this was an unmemorable war, proof that mankind needs little incentive to manufacture its own misery on a colossal scale. For individual soldiers going into battle on an individual day, it was the same as any other war. Some died, others were maimed, physically or mentally. Did it matter much to them whether or not this was a “good war”? Happy 100th birthday, World War I.