Cataclysm: The First World War as Political Tragedy
By David Stevenson
Basic, 564 pages, $35
Eleventh Month, Eleventh Day, Eleventh Hour
By Joseph E. Persico
Random House, 456 pages, $29.95
Forgotten Lunatics of the Great War
By Peter Barham
Yale University, 451 pages, $45
To the Last Man
By Jeff Shaara
Ballantine, 636 pages, $27.95
A Century of November
By W.D. Wetherell
University of Michigan, 176 pages, $24
At the start of his new history of World War I, David Stevenson asks a very basic–and very good–question: “Why commemorate the nearly ten million military dead of 1914-1918 when twenty million across the world lost their lives in road accidents between 1898 and 1998 and over thirty million in the influenza pandemic of 1918-1919?” Stevenson spends the next 500 pages providing a trenchant answer.
As good a one-volume history of the conflict as now can be had, “Cataclysm: The First World War as Political Tragedy” forgoes narrative flair for rigorous analysis. Stevenson considers nearly every aspect of the war–its military dimension, the politics on various home fronts, and the economic consequences, which proved dire for all the combatants.
Not least, Stevenson’s book is valuable for its pointed survey of the war’s origins, a matter of scholarly debate for generations. Though he fingers politicians on each side for stoking the flames of war, Stevenson concludes, “It is ultimately in Berlin that we must seek the keys to the destruction of peace.” It was a peace that proved all too fragile. Once the war commenced, it was fought with a mind-boggling ferocity until its very last day.
In “Eleventh Month, Eleventh Day, Eleventh Hour,” Joseph E. Persico ponders the absurdity of both sides in World War I throwing thousands of men against each other on the very morning hostilities were supposed to cease. For Persico, “the carnage that went on up to the final minute so perfectly captures the essential futility of the entire war. The mayhem of the last day was no different from what had been going on for the previous 1,561 days.”
If Stevenson prefers the soaring heights of broad perspective, Persico uses an intimate narrative focused on one moment in time, giving us a gritty, troops’-eye view of trench warfare. Through the use of flashbacks, he revisits the major battles of the Western front–the Somme, Ypres, Verdun–in concise sketches that trace the fortunes of characters until Nov. 11, 1918, Armistice Day, giving special attention to American soldiers, who joined their British and French allies on the battlefield in 1917 and played a vital role in bringing the war to its conclusion. One reads on with a sense of dread, knowing that these men will be sent into one last, pointless engagement in a fatal bid for glory.
For many soldiers on both sides, the nightmarish slaughter on the Western front proved overwhelming; the war provoked what was in effect a mental-health crisis among the troops, and thousands of fighting men cracked in the trenches. (It’s a wonder many more did not.) Yet if the image of the shell-shocked officer is an enduring one, the war’s effect on the psyche of rank-and-file servicemen has been underresearched. Peter Barham’s splendid (and splendidly titled) work of social history, “Forgotten Lunatics of the Great War,” which explores the psychological fallout on British soldiers, restores this missing perspective.
“The history of the forgotten lunatics of the Great War,” writes Barham, “draws us not into a closed ward of pitiful souls or some freakish side-show, a tiresome diversion from the main arteries of historical development, but onto a busy concourse.” Ranging from the debates over treatment and compensation for the afflicted to pungent–and moving–case histories of the men themselves, Barham combines biography with a far-reaching survey of mental-health trends in the early 20th Century. Though his theoretical asides and jargon-inflected prose can be intimidating for the lay reader, Barham’s fascinating study is impressive in its scope.
Perhaps more than any other conflict of the 20th Century, WW I inspired an outpouring of great literature. From the unforgettable poetry of Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen–the 28 lines of Owen’s “Dulce et Decorum Est” convey the futility of the war far more than any history book–to Pat Barker’s “Regeneration” trilogy in our time, the literary response to 1914-1918 shows no signs of waning.
Alas, Jeff Shaara’s “To the Last Man” cannot be counted as one of the more distinguished novels about the war. Shaara lurches uneasily from historical boilerplate to fictional re-creations of battle; he often seems unable to choose between the novelist’s voice and the historian’s authority, and never quite fuses the two modes into a coherent whole. Shaara is especially taken with the exploits of Baron Manfred von Richthofen–“the Red Baron”–and the American and British pilots who fought aerial duels with him in the skies over the Western front, and these episodes are clearly the most inspired parts of Shaara’s sprawling story.
If Shaara tries to capture the turmoil and confusion of the fighting on a huge canvas, W.D. Wetherell comes at the war from a different tack in his short novel “A Century of November,” the story of Charles Marden, a Canadian apple grower whose son dies in action in Belgium during the last days of the war. (It is often forgotten that Canada fought in WW I, though Canadian troops proved some of the Allies’ most resilient fighters.)
Marden makes an odyssey across Canada and then on to Belgium, determined to find the place where his son fell in battle. A deeply interior work about one man’s quest to make sense of a war that seems impossible to comprehend, “A Century of November” is an exploration of grief and bafflement. Though the Western front extended some 475 miles, opposing armies were arrayed in terrifyingly close proximity. Here, Marden, a wrecked trench before him, wonders at “how thin a line this was, how small the space involved, how unbelievable to think that the fate of civilization had come to depend on these few puny acres.”
