Reviewing Two Books on the Origins and the Peace of World War I (December 2024)

The Guns of August (1962) by Barbara Tuchman and Paris 1919 (2001) by Margaret MacMillan are histories of the first world war of the 20^th century—total war fervour for God and country, wartime abominations in defiance of what little humanitarian international law there was, ubiquitous rapid-fire machine guns for mass killing from a distance, ocean-going torpedo-bearing submarines tracking military and civilian targets, aerial bombers, poison gas, and so forth. Tuchman’s book focuses on the diplomacy and battles of the first month of World War I, August 1914, while MacMillan’s concentrates on the six months of ‘peacemaking’ from the 1918 armistice to the 1919 Versailles Treaty. Both are accessible and informative reads; Tuchman’s is superior in one important respect: “she makes the events of August, 1914, as suspenseful on the page as they were to the people living through them.” Both rely heavily on the importance of personalities and interpersonal relationships, an approach that leaves the reader convinced that the great decisions of war and peace are made by mere mortals, fallible at every turn.

These books about a war more than a century ago, a war that was once said to be the war to end all wars, speak of an era that does not seem so foreign anymore, given the return of war among the great powers in Europe and the prospects of a 3^rd world war that threatens to draw in not just the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council—the Great Powers at the end of World War II, the U.S., Britain, France, the U.S.S.R (now Russia) and China—but the rest of the world through the connections of these Great Powers with their treaty partners. Both books spend a great deal of time addressing diplomacy at the highest level of national governments and reveal a world of international relations governed by the irrational self-interest of nations, their leaders and their people. Then as now, the political class who most of the time earn the public’s disrespect and even contempt are shown to be inexplicably capable of mobilizing mass hatred and the drive to kill and dispossess an ‘enemy,’ whoever that might be.

The first, Barbara Tuchman’s The Guns of August, comes recommended by Jim Sciutto in The Return of the Great Powers (2024):

The same year the Cuban Missile Crisis unfolded, in 1962, Barbara Tuchman released her chronicle of Europe’s inexorable tumble into World War I, The Guns of August. President John F. Kennedy had read her book and, as the US and Russia sat on the brink of nuclear war, he was determined to learn from the mistakes of world leaders half a century before him—and to avoid repeating them.

According to Tuchman, the seeds of the Treaty of Versailles were sown in the 1870 Franco-Prussian War, which marked the birth of modern Germany. While MacMillan disputes the commonplace notion that “the Treaty of Versailles, whose harsh terms would ensure a second war,” it is nevertheless clear from her account of the Paris Peace Conference relative to many of the world’s hotspots—the Balkans, the border between France and Germany, the disputed Shandong (Shantung) Peninsula of northern China and the partitioned lands of the Ottoman Empire in the Levant and Palestine—that the peacemakers were unsuccessful in redrawing the world map in such a way as to prevent future conflicts some no more than a generation away.

While both books provide meaningful insights into how wars start and how the ensuing peace often contributes to war further down the road, there are two common shortcomings. First, neither adequately probes the economic rationale of war and peace in order to determine the prime movers. Tuchman and MacMillan take the reader behind the scenes to witness some of the planning and decision-making by government and military leaders, but neither gives a proper account of who and what drives the mobilization of these leaders to give the orders that will predictably lead to massive casualties. In other words, who conducts the cost-benefit analysis of war and just how much weight is really given to the lives of civilians and ordinary soldiers? Another way of framing the question is what part of society benefits the most from wars and what part assumes the greatest risks? Furthermore, whose voices count the most and does it matter whether the government is classified as authoritarian or democratic?

The second has to do with the nations and peoples not included in Europe and the English-speaking world—what in the years of the Cold War was aggregated into the category of the Third World and since the collapse of the Soviet satellites in Eastern Europe (the Second World) is now referred to as the Global South. What is missing in these two texts is what Antony Anghie attempted in Imperialism, Sovereignty and the Making of International Law (2005)—to provide “an alternative history of sovereignty, a history that focuses not on events in Europe but on the colonial confrontation between non-European and European societies.” MacMillan concedes that “[The peacemakers] took pains over the borders in Europe, even if they did not draw them to everyone’s satisfaction, but in Africa they carried on the old practice of handing out territory to suit the imperialist powers. In the Middle East, they threw together peoples, in Iraq most notably, who still have not managed to cohere into a civil society.” Note that MacMillan is writing prior to the post-9/11 war (illegally) waged on Iraq by the U.S.

In The Guns of August, Tuchman focuses solely on Germany as the cause of World War I and never mentions the great power conflict over colonies or the treatment of colonials by the British, French and Belgians. In fact, Tuchman’s chapters on diplomacy and battles read like a narrative from the Avalon Hill board game, ‘Diplomacy,’ occasionally punctuated by reminders of the atrocities of the war. In ‘Diplomacy,’—an exclusively European affair—the seven European powers, represented by Britain, France, Austria-Hungary, Germany, Italy, Russia and Turkey, each seek to maximize control over the map of Europe by means of negotiations backed by the strength of their armies and navies. In Avalon Hill’s ‘Diplomacy,’ the conflicts are fully sanitized, although the players can hardly escape falling into the logic of armed conflict as a means to national goals.

Where Tuchman lays the war guilt on Germany alone, MacMillan, having already denied Germany’s use of the Versailles Treaty as a legitimate casus belli, devotes her criticism of the peace conference to the aggrandizing aims of the Allies and other European states who rushed in to take advantage of the collapse of the German, Austro-Hungarian, Russian and Ottoman empires. The ideal and wholly impractical Wilsonian notion of self-determination manifests itself in the reality of ethnonationalist struggles for land on Germany’s borders in the East and the West, on the western borders of Russia, in the Balkans, in Anatolia, and in the Levant and Palestine. Incidentally, getting back to an earlier point regarding the exclusion of Europe’s colonial holdings, Wilson’s promise of self-determination was never intended to be a universal human right, i.e., a right to be exercised by non-Europeans as well as Europeans.

For today’s reader in the 21^st century, these histories are useful as a reminder that the spirit of age, as often portrayed in government press releases and the stories told by the news media, may not align with the full truth. And for more reading on that, the reader is referred to Phillip Knightley’s The First Casualty: The War Correspondent as Hero and Myth-maker from the Crimea to Kosovo (2002 edition). The first casualty is ‘the truth.’

As a side note, Barbara Tuchman was the granddaughter of Henry Morgenthau, President Woodrow Wilson’s ambassador to the Ottoman Empire during World War I, when he famously drew attention to the Turkish genocide against Armenians. Mehmed Talaat, de facto head of the Ottoman Empire, wrote the following in a German newspaper in 1916, inauspiciously foreshadowing arguments advanced in our 21^st century, albeit with a different cast of characters:

We have been blamed for not making a distinction between guilty and innocent Armenians. [To do so] was impossible. Because of the nature of things, one who was still innocent today could be guilty tomorrow. The concern for the safety of Turkey simply had to silence all other concerns.

MacMillan is the great granddaughter of David Lloyd George, the British prime minister during World War I who figures prominently and is generally treated favourably in the narrative.