In “The Guns of August,” Barbara Tuchman wrote, “the sun of the old world was setting in a dying blaze of splendour never to be seen again.”
She was describing the funeral of Edward VII of England in May 1910. Nine kings rode in a funeral procession for Edward VII of England. Following the kings were rows of heirs apparent, queens, empresses and prices, clad in scarlet, blue, green and purple uniforms, adorned with gold braid and magnificent orders, wearing helmets with plumes flying. The gorgeous spectacle was witnessed by hushed crowds who were awestruck as it went past them.
It was the dawn of the 20th century. The industrial age, spawned in Europe, was in full swing. Capitalism had replaced feudalism, international trade had replaced protectionism, and the economies of nations were flourishing. The monarchs of several nations were blood relatives, being grandsons of Queen Victoria. War, which had ravaged Europe for centuries, seemed to have been banished to the past.
The devastation caused by the Franco-Prussian of 1870 war was fresh in memory. Nor had the havoc wreaked by the Napoleonic wars been forgotten. But an astute British intellectual sensed that another war was coming. Norman Angell was concerned about the naval arms race that was underway between the English and the Germans. He felt it would lead to increased insecurity in both nations which could culminate in war.
Just a year before the funeral of Edward VII, he had written a book, “Europe’s Optical Illusion,” reissued a year later as “The Grand Illusion.” Angell argued that no nation would want to plunge into war with another because the economic cost of the war would far outweigh the benefits.
Angell wrote that economic interdependence between industrialised nations would be “the real guarantor of the good behaviour of one state to another,” as it meant that war would be economically harmful to all the countries involved. He also argued that nationalism had died and been replaced with capitalism.
War had become obsolete since the capitalist had “no country, and he knows, if he be of the modern type, that arms and conquests and jugglery with frontiers serve no ends of his, and may very well defeat them.”
Count von Bismarck had seen the conflict decades before it began, predicting that the next war would occur “because of some damned foolish thing in the Balkans.” And, indeed, it was the assassination of the Austrian Archduke Ferdinand of Austria in Sarajevo in 1914 that plunged Europe into war. The young British soldiers who landed in France after crossing the English Channel fully expected to be back home before the leaves changed colour. The weather was great so they stopped to play a cricket match.
Elsewhere, the Kaiser had raised a massive army intending to take Paris, assuming that it would lead to the capitulation of France. The French, never lacking in insight or ingenuity, had built strong defences. The Germans were not going to make a frontal assault.
They were going to take what the historian Liddell Hart would later call the indirect strategy. The Schlieffen Plan called on the Germans to invade France through Belgium. It was a neutral country. Any passage through Belgium would violate its sovereignty and would be viewed as an act of war not just by the Belgians but all of Europe.
Yet the Kaiser took the risk. As young German troops poured into Belgium, their officers told them it would be a cakewalk against “chocolate soldiers.” The Kaiser had assured them they would be home before the leaves began to fall from the leaves.
The Germans easily defeated the Belgian army. Then came the civil disobedience. They rounded up scores of locals, even children, and mowed them down. That drew in the British and the Russians into the war. Even then, some kept saying the war would end in six weeks.
In retrospect, it’s hard to imagine how a short war could involve three million soldiers. Admittedly, each side had a plan for ensuring a quick victory. They plunged into war with supreme confidence, setting aside the cautionary advice of the late Field Marshal von Moltke: “No war plan survives the first 24 hours of contact with the enemy.”
Norman Angell was concerned about the naval arms race that was underway between the English and the Germans
Barbara Tuchman focuses on the factors that led to the war, not on what followed once the war got underway. She shows how Germany planned its Belgian campaign, how General Foch developed a whole new military “mystique” to meet it, and eventually how the war spread to Turkey, Russia and Japan. She discusses how men began to die on the German-French front by the tens of thousands and turned into the horrible carnage that we can watch in movies such as “They shall not grow old” and “1917.”
A major strength of the book is the assessment of the characters that were at the helm during the war, including not only the generals but also Winston Churchill, then the Lord of the Admiralty. There were two classes of Prussian officers, “the bull-necked or the wasp-waisted.” The Kaiser was the “possessor of the least inhibited tongue in Europe.” Sir John French possessed “bold words and manner” but not the “natural juices of courage.” Churchill thought an adversary “wanted the glories of Napoleon without fighting any of his battles.” A French commanding general was known “less for his mental capacity than for the irritability of his battles.” The Czar of Russia was “neither well-endowed mentally nor well educated,” and was, in the Kaiser’s opinion, “only fit to live in a country house and grow turnips.”
The Germans crossed Belgium and were within striking distance of Paris when they ran into the Battle of the Marne and lost. Four years of war followed, trench warfare kicked in. The boundaries failed to use even though poison gas was used.
Millions perished in the war for no gain whatsoever for any party. Lenin’s Bolsheviks overthrew the Czar and the Ottoman Empire disappeared into history.
The war ended with the signing of the Armistice on the 11th of November, 1918. The reparations imposed by the victors at Versailles a year later unleashed a backlash in Germany which was anticipated by John Maynard Keynes in his book, “The Economic Consequences of the Peace.”
Decades later, David Fromkin would publish a riveting account, “The Peace to End all Peace,” showing that the victors redrew the map of the Middle East, laying the groundwork for the instability that pervades the region to this day.
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