The Pity of War (Paperback)

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 the workings 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 $11,345 to kill an Allied soldier, whereas it cost the Allies $36,485 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 ifs”. 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, but is it realistic? We’ll never know, which is perhaps just as well.

All in all, a long but interesting and thought-provoking book, and well worth reading.

But I feel D.A. O'Neil's review rather mistakes the purpose of the book, and is less than fair to it. It is, indeed, "dry" stuff compared with Barbara Tuchman or Lyn MacDonald, but if your object is to *understand* what happened, and how something else might easily have happened instead, this book is well woth buying and reading in full, though not necessarily at one sitting.

The author is primarily an *economic* historian, and is not setting out to answer questions about what happened and why at a battlefield level. He has a better understanding than many of his kind of the fact that wars are not determined exclusively by social and economic factors, but by who "gets there fustest with the mostest" and how they fight when they get there; but he is more interested in the external factors that influence these things - in particular the "sinews of war", the material resources that enable states to raise, train, equip, feed and pay troops, which are often forgotten.

Ferguson demonstrates at least two very surprising things about the War: that the Allies were much richer in resources than the Central Powers, but failed to make that advantage tell on the battlefield for almost four years; and that the Germans were militarily much more effective, in terms of killing their enemies, but still lost. He does not give a quick or glib answer to these questions, but that is a strength, not a weakness.

He also concentrates on a forgotten class of casualty, namely those captured by the other side, and makes a very good case for saying that the war was ultimately won not by killing the enemy but when they (whether Russians or Germans) were prepared to surrender in really large numbers. There is a fascinating discussion of the mechanics and risks of surrendering.

Read Tuchman, Macdonald, Terraine and Keegan, and (particularly if you really are a beginner) Martin Middlebrook's "The First Day on the Somme". But then read this book too, to make you think harder about what you already knew. The author's ultimate conclusion is that the pity of the War was that it was not just a tragedy, but also an error. This has contemporary relevance, as we try to understand whether the invasion of Iraq was right, wrong or a mistake.

It is great that Ferguson takes another angle at the subject. Even though he is controversial he hits the mark on many of the questions he sets out to answer.

The chilling bit about this book to me is that the détente (France, Britain, Russia) had far more resources at their disposal but used them rather poorly. Whereas, the German Empire by itself (not counting the rather ineffective Austrians) were in a minority position resources-wise, yet managed to inflict far greater casualties on the détente than should have been expected. The other chilling lesson I took home from the book is that the German Empire could have won the conflict. The German blunders of 1918, thank God, put an end to any such hopes. It is not a surprise that this notion is not terribly popular in Germany; the 'Dolchstoss-Legend' is a more convenient concept to believe in.

Not having ever been involved in war or even close to it, I found the chapter on casualties and the 'issue of surrender' a most fascinating read. I have never read it in such detail in any other book on WWI.

If you expected the usual 'guts-and-glory' book then this is the wrong book for you. Being an economic historian allows Ferguson to innocently tell the WWI story from a different angle. He perhaps takes a clinical view of the factors leading up to WWI and the issues arising during its execution. But this is as it should be.