The Guns of August

"This is a very strange book for me to choose. For many people, it is the ultimate old-fashioned diplomatic history. But it enthuses me for several reasons. First of all, it’s an extraordinary narrative. It reads magnificently and is a breathtaking horizon of events and people. Secondly, like me, she is obsessed with people. In the first chapter we have the funeral of Edward VII in 1910, which is attended by 10 European kings. She uses this funeral as a way of demonstrating the fundamental contradiction of pre-war Europe, in which increasingly bourgeois, urban, sophisticated industrial societies remained none the less monarchical, with only France as a major Republican power. Militarism and court cultures intermingled to an extraordinary extent. What Tuchman does so well is to document the kind of thought patterns that pervaded the many national rivalries, which was all to do with imperialism, social Darwinism, but, above all, military planning and strategy. Again, what I love about this book, and in this way there’s an affinity between Tuchman and me, is that it describes the importance of irrational forces and charts their implications. She tries to look at why the war took the course that it did and discovers the many miscalculations of the leaders at the same time as describing their utter inability to shift course. Like the soldiers in the trenches that lined the Western Front after the Battle of the Marne, decision-makers simply dug in and a generation of men were lost. Leaders, for example, couldn’t grasp that free trade wouldn’t make a short war and peace inevitable. The Germans didn’t realise that by invading Belgium they actually invited the British into the war. I also love the book because it is a history within a history. It became an immediate bestseller when it came out in 1962 and was the bible of key Cold War politicians, particularly US President Kennedy. What interested them was how to learn not to make the same mistakes. Apparently Kennedy kept citing it during the Cuban missile crisis where he resisted the advice of the military top brass. The shadow of World War I and the terrible mistakes and miscalculations of that war were constantly on his mind. His handling of the Cuban missile crisis was probably his finest achievement in an otherwise lacklustre presidency. Rarely are there lessons in history in an obvious or reductive sense, but in this instance this book seems to have had an important influence on how a president faced a terrible crisis."

"This is the gold standard. Barbara Tuchman’s name comes up and this particular book—which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1963—comes up over and over and over again. If you ask any number of historians, ‘If you could put your name on another history book, what would it be?’ inevitably, this is the book they choose. The first paragraph of The Guns of August is the equivalent of “Call me Ishmael” in Moby Dick . It’s the paragraph that everybody knows. “One of the things that you need to learn reading history is that historians write long books” One reason the history group has functioned well, I think, is that we really live in a golden age of narrative history. Because of the popularizing of history, we began to get back to history as storytelling. Many people give Barbara Tuchman credit for being the person that did that. She was not a professional historian. She was incredibly well-educated and well-read and researched everything you could possibly research, but she wrote it as a story. The historian Margaret Macmillan said that reading Tuchman, when she was a graduate student, was like history going from black-and-white to Technicolor. That’s what narrative history does for you. So, all of the books that I’ve selected are beautiful examples of narrative history, in terms of the style of historian. Narrative history, storytelling is more memorable. The best ones, it’s like reading a novel, only it’s 100% true—or at least as much so as we can make it. The book begins with King Edward VII of England’s funeral and the three cousins that are there: George of England, Wilhelm of Germany, and Nicholas of Russia. That’s the last time that that family will be together. The book itself focuses on, literally, August: from the frantic meetings to try to keep war from occurring, to the frantic meetings to make sure that your military is the first one in the field. And then it concludes with early September, the first battle of the Marne and the beginning of trench warfare, and the realization that this is not going to be a six-week war. You see everything unfolding through the eyes of multiple sources in every single country. You understand what they’re facing, the choices they’re making, and the sort of inevitability of it all. Once they got on that train, it just kept going. It’s a fascinating study in diplomacy. It’s a fascinating study in military planning and she just sprinkles it with the most interesting, strange facts about that time period. It’s a slightly different audience. Popular history rewards historians that write narrative, because they sell really, really well with the general public. The academic world in history is about close research, original ideas, etc.. It does not reward narrative history. Now, once you’ve proven yourself, if you want to write narrative, that’s allowed. But you’re not going to get narrative history or storytelling published in a peer-edited journal. They need each other. The best of the popular historians need the grinding through the boring details that the academic historian is going to do. That’s the research. Then you’re allowed to tell the story. I liked what Barbara Tuchman said, that the historian should be more of an artist than a scientist. That’s part of the difference. I do. I enjoyed the first half. Then, when she just focuses on one figure, Enguerrand de Coucy, I think it loses something. We actually just read that this year with the group. Because the plague is so important, it seemed like a really good time to read it. It turned out to be a lot of fun. We had a PhD student who is a medievalist, and so it was lovely. I turned over most of the questions to her. And she filled in things that I didn’t know. I mean, I’m always learning too, as you can imagine. So I do like it. I think the group was less enthusiastic."