Replies

May I also recommend this:

It’s World War One; there’s thirteen million killed; it was all because the militaries of both alliances believed they were so highly attuned to one another’s movements and dispositions, they could predict one another’s intentions, but all their theories were based on the last war. And the world and technology had changed, and those lessons were no longer valid, but it was all they knew, so the orders went out, couldn’t be rescinded. And your man in the field, his family at home, they couldn’t even tell you the reasons why their lives were being destroyed.

That war was so horrible Europe has still not recovered. Was there anyone back then who was talking about an alternative strategy to trench warfare? I know tanks were invented as a response, but anyone who has studied military history knows that frontal assaults are just plain stupid, and that armies need to use indirection with a goal of NOT fighting. In that regard, didn't someone early on point out the futility of trench warfare going back and forth over a few miles? Or did they just soldier on?

Early in the war, soldiers on both sides sang Christmas carols to each other. By the end of the war, they just wanted to kill the other side and get it done with. Perhaps that war played as big a role as anything in killing off Christianity in Europe.

I too love Hastings' work. Perhaps he has an answer to my questions in this book.

Hastings takes on two foes: first, revisionist historians such as Cambridge’s Prof Christopher Clark who have recently sought to exculpate Germany and put tiny Serbia in the dock as the chief villain, for organising or conniving in the assassination of Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand at Sarajevo – the spark that gave Vienna and Berlin a perfect excuse to set off the conflagration.

Clark does no such thing - his book is entitled "The Sleepwalkers" and I doubt the author of this has read it. He most certainly does not "exculpate" Germany. He does, however, remind us that Princip did not act alone.

This is a very old controversy with more points of view than a single reader can manage in a lifetime. It seems pretty well-established that Germany did have extensive war plans and a general staff eager to implement them, and a young Kaiser who was certifiable. Not exactly a peace and love society. It is also well-established that the Serbian nationalists wanted war - just not that kind and with that many players.

On the whole I would have to agree that Germany deserves the lion's share of the blame for the weird, snowballing set of circumstances that started the avalanche. But the entire story is fiendishly complicated. I'll look forward to seeing how Hastings does with it.