The First World War: A New History

Product Information

Keegan’s war is not a grand Good vs Evil, or a Defense of Democracy/Civilization, or whatever else. Great War non-fiction is a huge genre. It takes in volumes dealing with military history and the development of modern warfare, through to memoirs, biographies of those involved in the fighting, and everything in between. Best history books on WW1

One of the most respected non-fiction works on this subject of recent years is Christopher Clark’s Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914. Technology: Keegan does slip a bit at times and tries to show the influence of communication technology (esp radio) and military technology (esp tanks) but again, hedges it by showing us how contingent that too is. The British were ahead of the Germans in tank-tech, but it was purely fortuitous. Neither were using radio tech on the ground. Again, this was not rally a technological limitation. Consider how within two years radio was everywhere, so were tanks. 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. As well as Barbara Tuchman’s Guns of August, several significant works on the causes of World War One have been published over the years. It was first published in 1962 and its reputation has increased since then. Tuchman threw herself into research, covering the events leading up to the war and its first month, weaving a compelling narrative on how the war began. It’s an essential read for all Great War and military history enthusiasts. Best books on the causes of WW1The British were a lot more ad hoc. Sometimes that can be a bad thing. Sometimes you need uniformity and systematization, and the British couldn’t always manage that. But the real point—and the same is true for any organisation—is that change is easier to effect if you go with the cultural grain of the organisation rather than cutting across it. The British Army with all this ad hocery looks terribly haphazard, but actually it suits the way the British Army works. It’s striking that all the memorials of the First World War have religious overtones. There’s a cross in every Commonwealth War Graves Commission cemetery, for instance. There’s the stone of sacrifice, which looks just like an altar. A lot of modern historians, because of who we are and the relatively secular society that most of us have been brought up in, tend to underestimate how much religion was part of the warp and weft of everyday life 100 years ago. It must, therefore, have played a much greater role in explaining how people acted. America’s entry into the war. Superb analyses the arrival of 100,000 fresh troops a month in the summer of 1918 along the Western front. The German high command knew by the end of summer that they had lost the war. They were losing nearly every single battle/skirmish on the Western front and lost all their gains made in the Spring of 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. The First World War created the modern world. A conflict of unprecedented ferocity, it abruptly ended the relative peace and prosperity of the Victorian era, unleashing such demons of the twentieth century as mechanized warfare and mass death. It also helped to usher in the ideas that have shaped our times--modernism in the arts, new approaches to psychology and medicine, radical thoughts about economics and society--and in so doing shattered the faith in rationalism and liberalism that had prevailed in Europe since the Enlightenment. With The First World War, John Keegan, one of our most eminent military historians, fulfills a lifelong ambition to write the definitive account of the Great War for our generation.

A century of almost unbroken European peace—unbroken, that is, by wars hugely destructive—had built up insensibly in men’s minds a consciousness of an unbounded general stability in the political as well as in the physical world. The crust of the political globe seemed to have caked, on the whole, almost as hard and cool as that of the elderly earth. It felt as if it were so firm that we could safely play the fool on it, as boys jump on the ice of a pond and defy it to break under them. 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.What stands out from Mombauer’s discussion is just how policy-relevant is the discussion on the origins the First World War. The debate on who started the war was, indeed still is, of critical importance if one wants to understand the future course of European history. In particular, there is the question of Germany – a key focus of Mombauer’s study. If Germany wanted to evade the Versailles settlement after 1918, she needed to avoid the charge of having planned an aggressive war in 1914. After 1945, if she wanted to avoid the charge of continuity in German history stretching from the Kaiser to Hitler, drawing a distinction between the accidental war in 1914 and the war planned by Hitler in 1939 was even more crucial. In the context of this argument on German foreign policy, the writing of German history moved centre-stage and Mombauer sets out to show how Clio was deceived in the years after 1918 and, for while, after 1945. There had been a hundred years of freedom from destructive European land war. I mean, in 1870 the Prussians invaded France, but though that was interesting politically, it wasn’t so violent and destructive. So, fundamentally, having this absolutely catastrophically violent war crash onto the shores of a very peaceful society… I think that makes it resonate with us. She doesn’t explain to you, the reader, what the world is like. She just drops you into it. So there will be tons and tons of references to things you don’t understand or know about. The characters will refer to someone as a “conchie”, and you just have to figure out that that means a conscientious objector, she doesn’t tell you that. And the characters are constantly exchanging pieces of news with each other, the way you do. So it feels really rich and vivid, as if you were there. It’s a very clever and engaging and wise book. 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. Let’s move onto your fourth choice, Learning to Fight (2017) by Aimee Fox, which is about military innovation.