The First World War: A New History

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One shouldn't read compact one volume surveys of epic events. It is safe to assume that The First World War meets the criteria of epic event. Any single volume will only distort and compact events. This was no exception

John Keegan’s The First World War is a more detailed account of the conflict. He looks at the causes of the war, the personal stories of those involved, and its major battles. See Inside the First World War was written by Rob Lloyd Jones and illustrated by Maria Cristine Prite. It’s a fully illustrated flap book, with beautifully drawn scenes of the war from its 1914 beginnings through to its 1918 conclusion. It’s a great World War One picture book for young book lovers.But the most common temptation is to cite the American entry as turning point. And conversely to show the U-boat mishap as the big-stupid-decision. But was it really? Probing the mystery of how a civilization at the height of its achievement could have propelled itself into such a ruinous conflict, Keegan takes us behind the scenes of the negotiations among Europe's crowned heads (all of them related to one another by blood) and ministers, and their doomed efforts to defuse the crisis. He reveals how, by an astonishing failure of diplomacy and communication, a bilateral dispute grew to engulf an entire continent. Essentially, he says the world changes—or begins to change—with the performance of The Rite of Spring by Stravinsky in Paris in 1913. It’s an interesting thesis, but it’s wrong. You don’t have to be much of a cultural historian to know that modernism is often seen to pre-date that by quite a long way. People like Debussy and Baudelaire and Oscar Wilde are often seen as modernists in some sense. He also conflates modernism and modernity in a way that is not terribly helpful. He talks about this tiny coterie of avant-garde artists as if that’s what everyone in the country thought. That’s inevitably not true. The other major plot point is that they are in love with each other, but neither of them realises; they think it’s unrequited. And they aren’t able to communicate how they feel because it’s 1914. Anyway, they both end up at the front together, where the love story comes to a head because everything becomes so raw and intense. The question becomes not whether they love each other, but whether they will both survive.

I have a story that ties into this: Each year, I like to pay tribute to the 36th Ulster Volunteers, a division that played a big role in the battle of the Somme. I am half-Irish (also many other European nationalities), and one of the things in Ireland that is such a hot button issue is religion. I have ancestors from the Protestant North and the Catholic south, however, most of my family immigrated to the US around the 1700s. I have no family that served in this unit, but there's a song I listen to, that explains the 36th Ulster's deeds, and to me I feel that because we share the same ancestry, that I feel like I have some reason to pay tribute to them. (link to the song https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tuuYW... *note, I know this song is considered a pro-loyalist song, and I am not supporting any side in the Irish conflict, but this song to me is about the 36th volunteers not about the Irish conflict.) Throughout the book, I felt like Keegan was losing steam, or maybe I was losing interest. Certain theaters of the war, especially the battles in Africa, are relayed so half-heartedly, that I wondered why they were included at all. The great climax of the war – the last German offensive and the entry of America – becomes an anticlimax in Keegan’s hands. Despite offhandedly mentioning the tipping power of America’s entry onto the Allies’ side, the contribution of the Yanks is given extremely short shrift. I was trying not to write a novel. I’d written three, quite unsuccessfully. So I thought, right, I’m not doing that anymore. I was procrastinating writing a screenplay, and found out that my old boarding school had uploaded all of its newspapers from during the war years. I was in a war phase, you know? Reading Robert Graves. So I read all the newspapers from 1913 to 1919. So the book begins there, and it’s just a really fantastic read. It’s a good story, she’s an incredible writer—I mean, at a granular level, she uses punctuation really interestingly, and her dialogue feels incredibly vivid. I learned a lot about how to write historical fiction from this book, which I read after writing the first draft of In Memoriam.

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This serious, compact survey of the war’s history stands out as the most well-informed, accessible work available.” ( Los Angeles Times )