The First World War, Volume 1: To Arms

"Yes, 1,139 pages. You need pretty strong wrists if you want to read it in bed. The bibliography alone is 50 pages. And it’s almost all about just the first year of the war, 1914. In many ways, I think Sir Hew Strachan is the natural successor to Michael Howard. He was also Professor of Military History here in Oxford, at All Souls College. What’s different about this book is that although, again, it’s a synthesis, what he’s done is he’s gone off and read everything in every language and he’s identified—I think correctly—that you can’t understand any war, certainly not the First World War, unless you look at it from all different sides involved. War is a bit like other people’s marriages; it’s hard enough to understand even when you know all the facts. When you only know one side of the story, you have no chance. So his attitude throughout is comparative. He looks at it from the British point of view, the German point of view, the Austrian point of view and so on and so forth. You get a real sense of the similarities and differences between the countries and their experience of the war and what they’re all about. That’s the first point. “War is a bit like other people’s marriages; it’s hard enough to understand even when you know all the facts. When you only know one side of the story, you have no chance.” The second point is that he understands something that, particularly in Britain, we tend to forget. The centenary commemorations were a good example: you could have been excused for thinking that the British were the only people in the First World War. There was very little discussion of their allies and almost none of their enemies. Whereas Hew Strachan is saying, ‘No, you can’t do that. You’ve got to think of it as a world war. It’s called the First World War for a reason. You’ve got to put the world back in the world war.’ He sees it very much as a global event. Although, in theory, the book is only about 1914, in practice he spends a lot of time talking about themes that run through the whole war, like the financing of it. He also tells the whole story of the war in Africa, all the way up to 1918, in this first volume. So it’s much bigger than it pretends to be. You get a very real sense of how the war moved from being just a bunch of Europeans fighting each other into a World War, both in terms of the European war sucking in the resources of the world to add fuel to the fire but also in terms of the war being exported to Africa, to Asia, to the Americas. It’s not a work of advocacy. He’s not a barrister arguing a particular case. He’s more like a judge. On the whole, he’s summing up other people’s arguments and saying, ‘On balance, I think this.’ So it’s magisterial in that sense. It’s more useful for helping you understand the overall picture than for fighting a particular corner or a particular interpretation. Although, as I say, the two points that come out of the book are the need to treat the war internationally and the need to see it globally. Those were the new departures that he made when the book came out in 2001. Although some people had talked about looking at it in those terms, not enough people had. He was, essentially, laying down the agenda to say, ‘In future, here’s how we should be thinking about it.’ On the causes of the war, he does two interesting things. The first chapter of the book is a fairly traditional diplomatic history, ‘Such and such an ambassador said this’ and ‘Such and such a minister said that’ in the course of which he basically explains that he thinks—I’m scared of caricaturing his argument because it’s always more complicated—but, broadly, that Austria Hungary was the risk-taker. It was Austro-Hungarian mistakes, backed by Germany, that caused the outbreak of the First World War. This slithering-by-accident-into-war is not the case. Secondly, he says, ‘Look. There’s another aspect to this which is not actually to do with just the diplomacy. If you want to find the causes of the war, we have to look deeper. We have to look into mentalities: how people were thinking and the way that people thought about war and international relations. And even cultural trends.’ It’s about the ideas that make people fight as well as the relatively dry diplomatic documents. One of the points that he makes is that the traditional distinction that most historians make—whereby, broadly, you have international historians talking about the causes of war and then military historians talking about what happens during the war—is a false one. You can’t actually explain the causes of the war without also looking at its conduct and how it is fought out. Nor can you understand the conduct without understanding the causes. And so he tries, if you like, to bridge the divide between peace and war. There’s an element of social Darwinism to all this—the idea being that if you don’t grow, you will die. You have to keep expanding, or else you will die as a country or as a nation. That idea goes deep into the German psyche. That’s one example. But it’s also just, ‘Is war a viable way of carrying on international relations?’ Back then it was broadly accepted that it was. Now, most of us would probably say it isn’t. I don’t know if it’s a widely held view, but I hold it. It’s very hard to see how Germany could have won the war after the Battle of the Marne in 1914. She still had to lose it, but she wasn’t going to win it after that. The war had been decided by that battle, but it hadn’t been concluded. So, I think so and probably some military historians would also say that’s the case."