I've just finished this book by Niall Ferguson and I recommend it to anyone who's interested in the First World War. The period always fascinated me, because it changed everything, from the political geography of Europe to women's fashions and (until recently) British licensing hours. Four empires perished (German, Austrian, Russian, Turkish) and another (British) was mortally wounded. It gave the world the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany and an even worse war, and it marked the entrance of the USA on to the world stage. And it impacted the lives of ordinary people the world over; my grandmother's two brothers (36th (Ulster) Division) and the two brothers of my wife's grandmother (Australian Infantry Force) lie in France. Did it have to be this way? Professor Ferguson regards it as essentially history's biggest traffic accident. It was a war nobody wanted, but not only did it come but it also stayed for four years, in spite of the horrific cost in men and money. This is not a conventional battle-by-battle history; Ferguson takes an entirely different tack – he poses (and seeks to answer) ten questions: 1. Was war inevitable? 2. Why did Germany's leaders gamble on war in 1914? 3. Why did Britain get involved in a Continental war? 4. Was the war really greeted with popular enthusiasm? 5. Did propaganda and the press keep the war going? 6. Why did the huge economic superiority of the British Empire not inflict defeat on the Central Powers more quickly, and without US assistance? 7. Why did the military superiority of the German army fail to deliver victory over the French and the British on the Western Front? 8. Why did men keep fighting in the appalling conditions? 9. Why did men stop fighting? 10. Who won the peace? The answers he comes up with are occasionally surprising. Small wonder the book has had mixed reviews in academic historical circles. But of course there can never be “right†and “wrong†answers to such questions, only opinions. But, to this particular layman, Prof. Ferguson makes his cases very well. Many of the conclusions, insights and points of view are fascinating, and Ferguson, as always, writes with wit, clarity and style (this is my problem, I'm a sucker for nice writing). However, I did find much of the book heavy going – my knowledge of international finance is close to zero, and the book has big slabs of this as Ferguson discusses the financial world prior to 1914 and then the whole business of how to finance a major war for which you hadn't prepared. For me, one of the most dismal facts was how much it costs to take another human life in wartime. The Central Powers were far more efficient at killing than were the Allies – it cost the Central Powers ,345 to kill an Allied soldier, whereas it cost the Allies ,485 to kill a German soldier (I don't even want to think about how much it now costs the US military to kill an Iraqi - the waste in both human and financial terms is appalling). Another dismal fact is that, far from the legend that has come down, how many people ENJOYED the war and indeed got a kick out of killing other human beings. Ferguson also looks at the great “what ifsâ€Â. The British entry into the war (and it's clear that the UK government by no means felt obliged to uphold its treaty obligations to Belgium) made a continental war into a world war. If it hadn't, the result might have been the European Union 80 years early. And Lenin might have remained writing Bolshevik polemics in the bourgeois Zürich he hated and Hitler might have ended his days selling mediocre water colours in Vienna. It's an attractive thought. All in all, a long but interesting and thought-provoking book, and well worth the effort.
