A book review!

I am currently reading ‘Catastrophe – Europe Goes to War 1914’ by Max Hastings. I have previously only read one of his more recent histories and I like his style. I don’t know if it is something he’s done throughout his career, but the inclusion of observations and quotes from ordinary contemporary people add life to the story as it unfolds. The previous history of his that I read, which follows the same pattern, was ‘All Hell Let Loose: The World at War 1939-45’ and I thought that was the first time he had employed this style (I shall have to go back and read the preface to check).

Anyway. It works. I think it builds on the recent trend for narratives from participants of all ranks that were published in increasing numbers after the millennium, while the final handful of veterans was still alive. It remains effective and I think, makes for a better book. The more traditional style concentrates too much on politicians and generals, whilst the remembrances of the veterans, whilst interesting and valuable, ignore the wider sweep even as others ignore the particular. Hastings appears to have found the right mix of the two to give a rounded view of events.

The current book only concentrates on the events of 1914, commencing with the last month of peace between the assassination of Franz Ferdinand and the outbreak of hostilities and ending with the Christmas 1914 football match in no man’s land on the Western Front and the expulsion of the Austro-Hungarian army from Serbia.

I would and will have to read more material to compare his views with other writers. Apart from Barbara Tuchman’s ‘The Guns of August’, which covers the outbreak of war, and John Keegan’s ‘The First World War’, which is an excellent one-volume primer, I don’t remember reading anything else on the period since school.

One of the things I find refreshing is Hastings’ willingness to cut through contemporary chauvinism and jingoism to point out that many of the so-called exploits of the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) in 1914 were exaggerated and achieved with rather more help from the Belgians and French. He is merciless with reputations on all sides, but he is also fair where it appears that someone deserves credit. His opinions on how matters developed, for good or ill in any case are generally balanced by an examination of the context in which they happened, drawing on diverse reports and other sources, all contemporary, so he presents his opinion as a balance of probabilities and uses the same method to explain why he does not favour contrary theses.

Over all, I think this is an excellent piece of work. Hastings teases out a cohesive and evidenced train of thought to show how things happened and why. Few of the protagonists are entirely competent, or incompetent. The officers were not donkeys, but neither were they geniuses. The men they led were not, generally speaking, lions, but neither were they weak. They were just men, men in a position that no one had fully anticipated or thought through, making assumptions and consequent decisions and justifications that went unchallenged because frankly, the fog of war in 1914 was a complete pea-souper, not least because in addition to the technical difficulties in getting information from one place to another, or moving millions of men from one place to another, relatively few of the generals liked or trusted each other, much less wished to tell each other, their respective governments or indeed anybody anything about what was going on.

Some of the big names of the early war come out with precious little credit; it seems incredible a hundred years on that some of them got their jobs in the first place and almost inconceivable that they held on to them for so long afterwards.