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The First World War (1998)

Like any red-blooded American boy, I have a life long interest in War. But one war has always proven especially elusive and uninteresting to me, World War One. Perhaps it is due to the absence of great literature or movies; other than Sergeant York with Gary Cooper, what little art exists is all anti-WWI--the books: Good-bye to All That (Robert Graves), All Quiet on the Western Front (Erich Maria Remarque), & the movies: Paths of Glory, All Quiet on the Western Front, Gallipoli, etc. Perhaps the senseless slaughter of the trenches is too off-putting. Perhaps it is simple ambivalence about the cause or our participation. Whatever the case, it has just never captured my imagination. So the news that our greatest living Military Historian, John Keegan, was taking a whack at it, raised the possibility that here at last would be the book that would spark the flame of interest.

Alas, despite a yeoman effort by Keegan, who has produced an enormously readable and mercifully brief account that ranges from origins of the war to armaments to battles to politics to consequences, even this was not enough. In fact, there's a certain sense of noblesse oblige about Keegan's effort. One senses that he is writing more from a feeling of obligation than of interest or passion.

In his conclusion he says of the war:

    The chronicle of its battles provides the dreariest literature in military history; no brave trumpets
    sound in memory for the drab millions who plodded to death on the featureless plains of Picardy
    and Poland; no litanies are sung for the leaders who coaxed them to slaughter. The legacy of the
    war's political outcome scarcely bears contemplation: Europe ruined as a centre of world
    civilisation, Christian kingdoms transformed through defeat into godless tyrannies, bolshevik or
    Nazi, the superficial difference between their ideologies counting not at all in their cruelty to
    common and decent folk. All that was worst in the century which the First World War had opened,
    the deliberate starvation of peasant enemies of the people by provinces, the extermination of racial
    outcasts, the persecution of ideology's intellectual and cultural hate-objects, the massacre of ethnic
    minorities, the extinction of small national sovereignties, the destruction of parliaments and the
    elevation of commissars, gauletiers and warlords to power over voiceless millions, had its origins in
    the chaos it left behind.

We should be thankful that he has given us the only book we'll ever need to read about this dreariest of all wars.

(Reviewed:)

Grade: (B+)

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The First World War (1998)

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