The First World War - John Keegan

Great overall history suffers from unapproachable prose

I bought this book from a largescale bookseller recently. While it seems a very good and complete history of World War One which I had set out to find, it suffers from some very unapprochable prose and a writing style which, especially for non-British readers, means almost every sentence needs to be deciphered. Take for instance the phrase:

"The happenings set in motion by a particular scheme of action will rarely be those narrowly intended, are intrinsically unpredictable and will ramify far beyond the anticipation of the instigator."

I can think of at least half a dozen ways this phrase could have been said more simply and without loosing the meaning. Albeight, the loaded literary language does nail down the meaning. There can be no mistaking what is meant by 'instigator.' However, after a dozen or so pages into the book and almost every sentence is as 'loaded' as this one, it starts to seem like purple prose.

A fine military look at World War I

I read this book back-to-back with Sir Martin Gilbert's work of the same name. They're both fine books; they're completely different.

Gilbert looks at every aspect of the war, from the politics to the poems written by the men in the trenches, some of which he reprints. Gilbert spends many pages dwelling on the war's carnage - not only the huge number of casualties but the many whose bodies were blown to bits, never recovered, or found unidentifiable.

Keegan's book by contrast is a military history, and a fine one. No poems here. From Gilbert I learn what effect huge casualties had on the societies which suffered them, but from Keegan I learn more about why those casualties happened.

World War I became a stalemate, not only because artillery became too powerful for infantry to stand up to (the Germans near war's end were able to shell Paris from 75 miles away) but because generals, he finds, were effectively blind, deaf and dumb.

Communications had not gone through the same technology revolutions. Radio was in its infancy. Early telephone systems were clunky and fragile, their wires across battlefields invariably broken as soon as combat began. Runners were often killed.

Generals guided from the rear not out of cowardice but because they supervised huge fronts; no front position could put them close to all the action they commanded. They couldn't see the front, they couldn't get news of it, and they couldn't get orders through to it.

Artillery couldn't coordinate with the infantry it supported. Keegan gives many examples of battles going awry for these reasons. Shelling would begin, and when it ended infantry would advance. When infantry broke through, military strategy normally dictates continuing the swift advance to press the advantage. But if they did, they'd run into the shelling pattern for the next round of artillery, and had no way to communicate to the rear that they were doing unexpectedly well. And they had no way to get authorization for it. So they'd halt. By the time the army got organized to let them advance, a whole day might have passed, and they'd have lost their advantage as the enemy would have by then stabilized and reinforced its line.

Because of the chaos, generals would increasingly lay intricate patterns of movement and shelling, which were increasingly hard to keep to in the fog of war, and just worsened the problem.

Keegan does a fine job laying out the war's predicate in military terms. The chain reaction which set the war moving, leading to Austria's ultimatum to Serbia and invasion thereof, is usually represented as a diplomatic matter, but the reasoning behind it was military. It had eerie echoes of the Cold War's nuclear standoff, where the scariest scenario was that the fear of one side launching first would cause the other to actually do so, rather than lose their nuclear deterrent, and so start a nuclear war that wasn't really necessary. Use it or lose it, as it was called.

Here, Germany faced the rigorous and intricate timetable imposed by the brilliant but flawed Schlieffen Plan: Germany couldn't fight a two-front war, but it could, if it kept to the clockwork of its plan, defeat France in 40 days and then turn to face Russia, which would take that long to mobilize its huge army in its huge country. Germany couldn't waste a moment beginning its troop movements. Russia, with its logistics problems, couldn't afford to stop moving troops once it started, and couldn't afford to let Germany or Austria make huge gains in its west before it got the strength of its army up front. France had little space it could afford to give up to a German thrust and had to respond quickly if it felt an attack imminent.

Keegan dissects each year of the war and each major action. What is most interesting is how Germany managed to lose this war: it dominated most actions on most fronts and had the most creative and audacious generals.

Wasn't expecting it to be this good.

Over the last year, I have read a lot of books on WWII, and some on the Winter War in Finland and the Spanish Civil War. I was ready for a general overview of WWI and bought Keegan's book based on Amazon reviews. I have to think the "Civilization" review got it right as "The best one-volume account there is." It was unlike many histories in that I hated to stop reading it each evening. Well done and enjoyable.

Holes, biases present

Keegan's prose is a little leaden, and the book could use better maps, as has been remarked. Keegan misses a few facts, such as failing to mention the taxicab drivers who ferried French troops to the front in the First Battle of the Marne (also known as the Miracle of the Marne), as well as why Moltke the Younger was abruptly relieved of command (failing to mention he suffered a nervous breakdown). The taxicab incident is considered by some as unimportant but it should have been mentioned; however, absence of Moltke's breakdown definitely is a oversight. I'm not an expert on WWI but a few other mistakes no doubt are present. Keegan shows bias, which all historians do, mentioning the Turkish deportations against the Armenians as "the Ottoman government's undeclared campaign of genocide against their Armenian subjects", which, if you read The Armenian Massacres in Ottoman Turkey: A Disputed Genocide by Guenter Lewy, is not so clear cut (then again, Lewy's book was published in 2007, after Keegan wrote his book, but my point is that Keegan has his prejudices). Also Keegan seems (to me) to praise the British soldiers excessively, he may have had a UK reading audience in mind, though that may be just my prejudice. All in all, a competent, workmanlike history of WWI. I liked some of his other books better.

Authoritative, comprehensive but few surprises

which may be the point. Keegan is a very reliable historian. He takes a steady, thoughtful, thorough approach to the build up to the first world war and then leads his readers step by long step through the war. While readers will find little to argue with I will venture to guess that they will find little to delight or astound them either. The sections on Serbia and the Eastern front in particular offer interesting reading though the book in general feels like a textbook.