2,213: Rasputin - A Short Life by Frances Welch

Despite (or maybe because of!) the awful '70s ear worm by Boney M, I, like millions of others have a fascination with the story of Rasputin, the hairy and insanitary but, apparently, sexually irresistible monk who came out of Siberia to wield extraordinary influence over the last Tsar and Tsarina of Russia.

There's something almost Grand Guignol-esque about Rasputin's story, retold vividly by Frances Welch in this short and highly enjoyable biography.  It's the story of a peasant from a village in the depths of Siberia who, one day, abandons his wife and children to go and stay in a monastery, from which he emerges as a religious mystic.  Traveling to Kazan and then to Kiev, he attracts the attention of high-ranking Russian Orthodox clerics, including the splendidly monikered Theophanes of Poltava, occasional confessor of the Tsar and Tsarina.  Theophanes then introduces him to the Grand Duchesses Milica and Anastasia who, buying in to his reputation  as having healing powers, recommend him to the Tsarina as being able to help the Tsarevich, Alexei, a haemophiliac.

Although there is no evidence that he really was possessed of healing powers, Rasputin did actually appear to be able to help with Alexei's illness and he rapidly becomes a favourite of both the Tsar and Tsarina.  Taking full advantage of this, Rasputin becomes notorious in St Petersburg for drunkenness and depravity, selling his influence with the royal couple for money and sexual favours from his "little ladies" and is thought to have Svengali-like influence over the Tsar and, especially, the Tsarina, whose lover he is rumoured to be.

Finally, having made enemies everywhere, he survives several assassination attempts until, on the night of 29 December 1916 (modern calendar), Prince Yusupov and Grand Duke Dmitri, two former friends and associates of Rasputin, lure him to Prince Yusupov's palace where, having got him drunk, they poison him and then, when the poison seems not to be having any effect, Yusupov and another conspirator shoot him several times before the body is dumped in the river Neva.

Rasputin's story has all the ingredients of a good, schlocky melodrama - weird mystical villain, sex, violence, aristocrats and royals and it even has its own spooky sting in the tail as, shortly before his death, he wrote Tsar Nicholas a letter, in which he predicted:

“If my death will be staged by your relatives, then none of your family members, none of your children or relatives will remain alive for more than two years. All will be killed by the Russian people. And I will be killed too. I’m not among the living anymore. Please, I beg you, be strong! Think of your blessed family.” 

His death did, indeed, come at the hands of junior members of the Romanov family and, as we all know, on 17 July 1918, less than two years after Rasputin's murder, the Tsar, Tsarina and their five children were murdered by Bolshevik revolutionaries at the Ipatiev house in Yekaterinburg.

Of course, it is also this that turns Rasputin's story from melodrama into tragedy for, although blame for the October Revolution can hardly be laid at his door, his perceived influence over the royal family and, in particular, the lurid rumours of a sexual relationship with the Tsarina (and even one particularly virulent story that he had raped the Tsarina's children in their beds) became a kind of avatar for the alleged rottenness at the heart of the monarchy and helped the likes of Lenin portray revolution as a cleansing act for Russia, clearing out the corrupt aristocracy to give birth to a new order and, ultimately, the mythical ascetic New Soviet Man.  The impact of Rasputin was seen as so great at the time that Kerensky, head of the provisional government formed after the Tsar's abdication, said:

"Without Rasputin, there could have been no Lenin."

Part of the mystique that surrounds Rasputin is that there are so many stories and rumours about his life that it is difficult to know what is truth and what is fiction.  This has allowed Frances Welch the freedom to take a judicious, and at times even humorous, view of his escapades whilst writing a vivid and highly readable biography.  She interweaves the narrative with the wider story of the political struggles faced by the Tsar during the First World War, which puts the story into perspective and allows the reader to understand the corrosive effect Rasputin had upon the monarchy and, by extension, Russia.

She finishes the book with a wonderful excursion through Rasputin's cultural afterlife and finishes with a lovely bit of trivia - far from being the massively-endowed sex machine of legend, a medical examination of Rasputin in 1914 after another failed assassination attempt revealed that his genitals were so small that his doctor believed that it was unlikely he could ever, to put it crudely, "get it up".

So, there you go.  To paraphrase the great Boney M, although he probably wasn't actually Russia's greatest love machine, he was indeed a cat that really was gone and it really was a shame how he carried on.  And I recommend you read France Welch's biography to find out exactly how he did carry on.

2,219: To End All Wars by Adam Hochschild

During this centenary year of the outbreak of World War One, I’ve been reading a number of books about the War and its causes.  One of these, Adam Hochschild’s To End all Wars approaches the subject of this terrible event from a slightly different angle to most.  As is clear from the following quote, Hochschild’s sympathies are clear:

“"If we were allowed to magically roll back history to the start of the 20th century and undo one – and only one – event, is there any doubt that it would be the war that broke out in 1914?

To Hochschild, an historian of a pacifist inclination, World War One was an unnecessary folly, from which no good but an inordinate amount of evil came.  His book tells this story, and the story of the War, by focusing on those who stood up to protest against the War or who refused to participate.  The book’s subtitle is “How the First World War Divided Britain” and the author attempts to demonstrate this be contrasting the stories of dissenters with those of willing participants and supporters of the War.

Fascinatingly, many of the individuals he features were linked together by ties of family or friendship.  One of the book’s villains, Sir John French, commander of the BEF was, to Hochschild’s mind, a snobbish incompetent, calmly throwing away the lives of thousands of ordinary soldiers in misconceived attacks.  Yet his sister, Charlotte Despard, a suffragette and socialist activist, was a bitter opponent of the War, forming the Women’s Peace Crusade.  What is even more amazing is that the two siblings remained close and affectionate throughout the War, only becoming estranged when French, as Commander in Chief, Home Forces, suppressed the Easter Rising, much to the disgust of Despard, a SinnFein member.

Another tortured family relationship explored by Hochschild was that of the Pankhurst sisters, all leaders in the suffragette movement.  Whereas Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst believed that the German aggression was a threat to all humanity and felt that cooperating with the Government might also help their cause after the War, Sylvia and Adela, Emmeline’s other daughters took the polar opposite view.  The family became irretrievably fractured.

But Hochschild also explores other, lesser-known dissenters, such as the bizarre story of Alice Wheeldon, a committed pacifist and second-hand clothes dealer in Derby.  A forceful anti-war campaigner and a harbourer of draft-dodgers, she, together with two other family members, was convicted of plotting to assassinate the Prime Minister, David Lloyd George, an accusation that was, almost certainly, trumped up by Government agents.

Hochschild reinforces his message with the grim and, even now, nearly incomprehensible statistics of death and destruction.  To give just some examples, he points out that half of all Frenchmen aged between 20 and 32 at the outbreak of war were dead by Armistice Day in 1918, that 9 million soldiers died and 21 million were wounded (including one of my great-grandfathers) and that nearly a million soldiers from Britain and its Empire perished.  One of the most shocking comments he makes is that:

"If the British dead alone were to rise up and march 24 hours a day past a given spot, four abreast, it would take them more than two and a half days."

To End All Wars is written with a passion and, indeed, compassion, that makes it intensely moving and a pleasure to read.  As a history of the War, it must be said that it doesn’t add a huge amount to the forest of First World War histories on the market but its account of British dissent during the War is a valuable additional to the general literature.

The main issue I have with it though is that it doesn’t really reflect the truth.  Although the dissenters and objectors were impassioned and brave and, although a case can be made (albeit not a conclusive one) that they were, ultimately, correct, they didn’t truly divide Britain.

One of the standard narratives of the War, influenced probably by the ubiquity of the likes of Owen, Sassoon and Graves on British school syllabuses, is that of an initially enthusiastic country becoming more and more disillusioned and hostile to the War as the casualties mounted and the horrors of the trenches became known.  But, nevertheless, the country and the army held together until the end.  There was no serious risk of giving up; Hochschild’s sub-title simply isn’t borne out by the facts.  The dissenters may well have had a case but they had very little substantive impact.

Despite this flaw, To End All Wars is a worthwhile read.  It may give undue prominence to the anti-War movements but it reminds us of the suffering caused by War and the global tragedy of a generation cut down in its prime.

2,337-2,336: Two Books on Psychiatry and War Crimes Trials

Two things first opened my mind as a teenager to the possibility of becoming a lawyer: the incomparable Rumpole of the Bailey, John Mortimer’s Falstaffian defender of freedom, lost causes and the Timson clan and the Nuremberg war trials, which formed the subject of my History O-level project.

The Nuremberg trials, as well as being fascinating from a legal point of view, given the novelty of both the idea of such a trial and some of the charges with which the defendants were charged, were a crystallising moment in history, a period where the crimes of Hitler’s Germany were first brought to the attention of the world and were documented in forensic detail.  To those of us now accustomed to seeing archive footage of the concentration camps and other atrocities, it may be difficult to grasp the shock and impact of this but the showing of film of the camps at the trial formed one of its most dramatic events – a moment where some of the chief architects of Nazi Germany were confronted with their most obscene ‘achievements’.

Douglas Kelley was a US Army psychiatrist assigned the task of maintaining the mental health of the defendants before and during the trial.  A driven achiever with a complex family background, he also assigned himself the task of analysing the defendants to try and determine whether the leading Nazis were mentally abnormal, implying that the Nazi regime was a unique historical phenomenon, or whether they were, in fact, normal, raising the chilling conclusion that, given the correct conditions, regimes similar to Nazi Germany could arise almost anywhere.

Jack El-Hai’s The Nazi and the Psychiatrist deals admirably with this argument, whilst also containing a biography of Kelley who, in an eerie echo, was to commit suicide by cyanide, the same method as his chief patient at Nuremberg, Hermann Goering, had used to cheat the gallows.

Given that Kelley’s personal background and life was so full and complex, and that his tenure at Nuremberg and interactions with the Nazis could itself have filled a book, it should come as no surprise that The Nazi and the Psychiatrist is, whilst an excellent read, slightly unsatisfying, falling somewhere between a number of stools, being part-biography, part reportage and part analysis.

Everyone who reads The Nazi and the Psychiatrist will find something of interest, whether in Kelley’s life, his relationships with Goering and Hess or the conclusions he draws.  I was less interested in Kelley’s personal life than in an objective account of his work at Nuremberg.  In particular, having read both his account of his time there and the account written by his colleague and rival, Gustave Gilbert, I was most interested in the account of their rivalry and the different conclusions they reached about the defendants.  Gilbert viewed the chief Nazis as psychotic and abnormal, giving a comforting message to America that Nazi Germany was unique.  Kelley concluded the opposite and spent much time lecturing and speaking on how similar things could happen in America and elsewhere.  El-Hai’s synopsis of the controversy and its development over the years is excellent.

By contrast, A Curious Madness, sticks more closely to the personal.  Its author, Eric Jaffe, is the grandson of US Army neuropsychiatrist, Daniel Jaffe.  After having served in Germany during the final months of WWII, Jaffe was posted to Tokyo, where he was asked to determine whether Okawa Shumei, a leading Japanese nationalist thinker, was mentally fit to stand trial at the Tokyo war crimes trial, the ‘other Nuremberg’ about which we in the UK at any rate, know far less.  Although initially indicted, Shumei’s behaviour in custody had been erratic and, when, during the first days of the trial, he slapped former Prime Minister Tojo on the head, the President of the Court ordered a psychiatric evaluation.

Jaffe determined that Okawa was unfit to stand trial and he was transferred to hospital, where he completed a Japanese translation of the Koran and made a seemingly miraculous recovery.  Re-examined by two psychiatrists who came to different views on his mental state, there has always been a school of thought that believes Okawa was feigning madness and fooled Jaffe.

The starting point of the book is Jaffe’s attempt both to find out more about his grandfather and finally to answer the question of whether his grandfather’s assessment had been correct.  A Curious Madness develops into the interwoven biographies of both Daniel Jaffe and Okawa Shumei and touches on many broader and fascinating subjects such as the early days of psychiatric engagement by the US military and its theories on the treatment of combat fatigue and the development of Japanese conservative nationalist thought in the period up to WWII.  Jaffe’s focus is clearly on his grandfather which enables him to maintain the balance of A Curious Madness towards the biographical.

If I’m perfectly honest, I preferred The Nazi and Psychiatrist to A Curious Madness (although both are well worth reading).  In part this is because I am so much more familiar with the Nuremberg trials and the personalities of the former – I may have enjoyed the latter more had I read more on the Tokyo war crimes trial first.  I was also less interested in the personal biographies of the psychiatrists and more interested in their work and conclusions – readers with more of a biographical bent may have a different view.  Consequently, although I believe Eric Jaffe does a better job of focusing his story, I found El-Hai’s book more to my taste.

For those interested in World War Two or the development of criminal psychiatry, these books are well worth reading and thoroughly recommended.  For the more general reader, they may be a little specialised and off-beat, although they are still good reads and should also appeal to the general lover of biographies.

I would like to thank Scribner and Perseus Book Group for allowing me to read A Curious Madness and The Nazi and the Psychiatrist respectively via NetGalley.

2,442: The War That Ended Peace by Margaret MacMillan

One doesn’t have to be Mystic Meg to make a decent fist of creating a publisher’s calendar for history books over the next few years.  Heading into next year, we will begin marking the centenaries of the events that shaped the 20^th Century and that are amongst the most fascinating of modern history.  As well as the First World War, there will be major anniversaries of the Bolshevik Revolution, universal suffrage, the founding of many European countries, the Wall Street Crash and the Great Depression, before we move into commemorating the Second World War and the Holocaust.

The main focus of the next four years, however, will inevitably be the First World War and, with almost a year remaining until August 1914, there is already a veritable slew of important and high quality books hitting the shelves.  As well as Sean McMeekin’s excellent July 1914, Christopher Clarke has produced The Sleepwalkers, Max Hastings’ Catastrophe is in the best-seller lists and Kate Adie and Richard Evans are amongst a number of writers who have authored books focusing on aspects of the War.

It’s hardly surprising really.  The First World War was, arguably, the most significant event of the 20^th Century, causing a fundamental shift in the balance of power between Europe and the United States, helping bring Lenin to Power in Russia, destroying four empires (Germany, Russia, Austria-Hungary and the Ottomans) and setting the scene for the rise of Fascism and Nazism.  Although it is an oversimplification to paint pre-1914 Europe as a kind of pre-lapsarian paradise, it is true to say that nothing would ever be the same again.

One of the most fascinating aspects of the Great War is the fact that the great European powers appear to have walked almost blithely into war, without any real moral compulsion.  By comparison the causes of the Second World War are both clearer and more easily acceptable – it was much more obviously a Manichean struggle of good versus evil, whereas it is plausible to argue that none of the combatants in the First World War had a compelling moral ground for war.

Generally speaking, since the 1960s and the emergence of Fritz Fischer and the group of other German historians who argued that the War had indeed been planned by an aggressive Germany, the debate has been framed as a blame game.  It is a sign of the complexity of the issue that almost every major combatant has been accused of responsibility – McMeekin blames Russia (with a side-swipe at France), Clarke points the finger at Serbia, Max Hastings sides with Fischer in putting Germany in the frame whilst Niall Ferguson thinks that Britain was the guilty party.

Rather than picking a horse in this unedifying race, the excellent Margaret MacMillan comes at the issue from a different angle and poses the question – why did Europe choose war rather than peace in those fateful days in July 1914?

If this just seems like another way of asking who was to blame, look at it more as a question of why the political and diplomatic systems of Europe failed to address tensions without resorting to war.  For, as MacMillan concludes, war in 1914 ultimately boiled down to a failure of the politicians and diplomats both to resolve these tensions and to control the military men.

MacMillan is an excellent narrative historian (as amply demonstrated in Peacemakers, her book on the Paris Peace Conference, which is one of my favourite history books of all-time).  In The War that Ended Peace, she skilfully tells the story of Europe’s march to war, beginning with Germany’s doomed naval arms race with Great Britain.  Although never actually blaming Germany for the outbreak of war, MacMillan draws out the rare ability of the Kaiser and his successive Chancellors to achieve the precise opposite of their aims with truly incompetent diplomacy and statecraft.  As well as the arms race, this is most impressively shown in MacMillan’s description of the first Moroccan crisis in 1905.  Intended to drive a wedge between Britain and France during the infancy of the Entente Cordiale, Germany managed to draw the two powers more closely together, tacitly expanding the Entente to encompass military cooperation.

Another major causal factor was the failure by the European powers to see that the system of alliances that grew up during the 1900s effectively to replace the old Concert of Europe could be perceived by their opponents as threatening rather than as the purely defensive structures they were intended to be.  Professor MacMillan also highlights the truly astonishing extent to which those in power came to believe and accept that war was both inevitable and, for many of the military leaders, even desirable.

This might have been manageable if it were not for the fact that, having survived a number of crises (notably twice over Morocco and numerous times over the Balkans) without major conflict, civilian leaders assumed that their opponents would back away from the brink of the abyss and, in doing so, allowed militarism and the power of the military leaderships to grow.  When this combined with the inflexible military plans that Germany, amongst others, had adopted and the pressures imposed by mobilisation requirements, all that was needed was a spark to light the tinder.  This was fatefully provided by Gavrilo Princip and fanned by Germany’s blank cheque to Austria, the drive and fatalism of Austria’s von Hotzendorff and the refusal of the German general staff to contemplate mobilising against Russia alone rather than both Russia and France.  The final nail in Europe’s coffin was the decision by Germany to violate Belgium’s neutrality, thereby completing Britain’s hesitant entry into the conflict.

MacMillan repeatedly compares the political leaders in Europe unfavourably with the JFK of the Cuban Missile Crisis, pointing out that, at a similar crisis point, he had made choices that led to peace and not war.  Although there is little to credit the Europeans for, I find the continued comparison a little unfair – Kennedy was dealing with a single opponent in a relatively straightforward scenario.  By contrast, Europe contained five roughly comparable powers, with a range of mid-level players capable of having an impact and all of these had their own internal issues to deal with as well as the international issues (MacMillan also points out the nascent power of public opinion even in the more autocratic nations).  I would submit that the overall state of play was much more complex.

As well as being an excellent, balanced and highly readable account of the years leading up to the outbreak of war, The War that Ended Peace shifts the argument away from the usual blame game.  Although critical of the individual decisions of the nations and individuals concerned, MacMillan refrains from pointing the finger at one single country, saying:

“The most we can hope for is to understand as best we can those individuals who had to make the choices between war and peace.“

In the end, those choices led to war and to the death of 16 million people and a further 20 million casualties.  At the end of The War that Ended Peace, MacMillan summarises what happened to many of the key actors during this period.  It is depressing to read just how many of them ended their lives in peaceful retirement or without punishment or suffering.  It is equally chilling to read that Gavrilo Princip, the man whose assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand was the catalyst for war, felt and expressed absolutely no regret for what he had done.

I’d like to thank Random House for allowing me to read The War that Ended Peace via Netgalley.

2,447: Stalin's General by Geoffrey Roberts

For the British (and, possibly, American) reader, there’s a section in Armageddon, Max Hastings’ masterful account of the last year or so of WW2 in Europe, where the author contemptuously dismisses the military qualities of almost all of the leading British and American generals of the time.  Indeed, pretty much only Eisenhower, Montgomery and Patton emerge with even faint praise, although even this is tempered with much criticism.  Counterpointed with his comments on the superiority of the German armed forces, it comes as no surprise that Hastings points to the Red Army as the real victors of the land war in Europe.  In summary, he believes that the Soviets supplied the blood, the Americans the equipment and the British contribution was to hold out in 1940.

Given all of this, and that for most of the War, Georgy Zhukov was the Soviet Union’s leading professional soldier, it is arguable that Zhukov was the general most responsible for the ultimate defeat of Germany in 1945.  Present at pretty much all of the most significant battles on the Eastern Front (including the siege of Leningrad and the battles of Moscow, Stalingrad and Kursk), Zhukov’s forces won the race to Berlin and it was troops under his command who placed the red flag atop the Reichstag building.  Named Deputy Supreme Commander, Stalin permitted Zhukov the honour of taking the victory parade in Red Square, sitting astride a white charger.

And yet, within a year of this zenith, he was in disgrace and banished by Stalin to a military backwater until Stalin’s death and his rehabilitation by Khruschev which culminated in his appointment as Minister for Defence, followed almost inevitably by further disgrace and dismissal.  Suffering the reputational trashing that followed, Zhukov lapsed into obscurity until the replacement of Khruschev by Brezhnev gave him the opportunity to reclaim his reputation and to write a self-serving autobiography before dying in 1974.  Since then, his iconic status has remained untouched and, in 1995, a statue of Zhukov on the famous white stallion was erected in Red Square itself.

In totalitarian regimes such as the old Soviet Union, history becomes a political tool of the regime and it can be difficult to know where truth lies.  This is doubly so in Zhukov’s case with his rises and falls from grace and his sometimes unreliable memoirs.

It is, therefore, welcome that Geoffrey Roberts, given access to previously unpublished Russian archive material, has written a new biography, seeking to readdress Zhukov’s position in Soviet history and to give a more accurate portrayal of the man.

In many ways, Zhukov was a prototypical Soviet success story, the child of a proletarian family who climbed to the very top of Soviet society through a mixture of talent, hard work, luck and political reliability.  A dedicated communist, he was a brilliant offensive general, skilled in the use of deception as a tactic and Stalin’s favourite general, given a latitude not extended to other generals and used almost as a troubleshooter, being sent off to any major situation.

The flip side was that he was arrogant and keen to make certain that he received full credit for his successes - traits that led directly to both his falls from grace and ensured that there was no shortage of rivals and colleagues ready to criticise him and trample on his reputation at the right time.

Zhukov could also be fairly accused of taking a cavalier attitude towards the lives of the men under his command and of only being concerned with body counts to the extent they impacted on the effectiveness of his forces.  He could also be a bully and appeared to take a tolerant view of the campaign of rape that the Red Army waged across Germany in 1945.  Another criticism is that his impact on Soviet military doctrine and theory was limited - a criticism I find slightly unfair.  After all, the mark of a wartime general lies in his victories and, in this, Zhukov was unsurpassed in WW2 and ranks alongside any Russian or Soviet military leader of any period.

Roberts does not shy away from these criticisms and also exposes the lies and exaggerations that Zhukov makes in his memoirs in defence of his reputation.  Yet, despite his stated intention of writing a critical biography, it is clear that Roberts is positively disposed to Zhukov and, where differences of opinion arise, tends to give Zhukov the benefit of the doubt.  One should not forget, however, that Zhukov for all his positive qualities and his relative independence from Stalin was a committed communist and follower of Stalin whose last action as a military leader was to mastermind the uncompromising suppression of the Hungarian Revolution of 1956.

Stalin’s General does an excellent job of retelling Zhukov’s life story and setting it in its true historical context.  Roberts also succeeds in reconciling the competing claims for credit made by leading figures such as Stalin, Khruschev, Konev and Rokossovsky.

What it doesn’t quiet manage to do, however, is to give much insight into the personal life or the mind of Zhukov.  Roberts does make some attempt to do this and we do learn about his somewhat complicated love life - four children, two wives and a long term lover - but at the end, he is still something of a mystery as a human being.  Given the exigencies of Soviet politics and history and the inadvisability of writing down unedited thoughts, it is, of course, possible that Roberts has done as much as will ever be possible along these lines.

Roberts rates Zhukov as top of a kind of military geeky league table of Soviet and Russian generals and, whilst it is probably impossible to make definitive judgements across time, it is certain that, in Zhukov’s sometimes brutal but effective manner, the Soviet Union got the general it needed to win the long drawn out existential battle that was the Eastern Front.

Stalin’s General is an interesting and necessary biography of one of the most significant figures of WW2 and a “must read” to anyone interested in this period or, more generally, in Russian history.  Whether it becomes the definitive biography probably depends upon whether there is any as-yet undiscovered archival material out there that could shed more light on the inner Zhukov.

I’d like to thank Random House for allowing me to read this via Netgalley.

2,461: July 1914 by Sean McMeekin

Tomorrow marks the 97^th anniversary of the first day of the Battle of the Somme, one of the bloodiest and, arguably, pointless offensives of the First World War.  Following a week-long artillery bombardment, at 7:30 a.m. on 1 July 1916 the guns fell silent, the air was filled with the sound of whistles blown by officers and 11 British divisions climbed out of the their trenches and began to walk across no man’s land to the German lines.

It was a disaster of near apocalyptic proportions.  The bombardment had both warned the Germans of an impending attack and failed to knock out their defences.  Opening up with machine guns from their trenches, it was nothing short of slaughter.  By the end of the day 20,000 British troops lay dead (including almost the whole of the Newfoundland Regiment, a part of the British Army as Newfoundland had not yet joined the Canadian Confederation) and a further 40,000 had been wounded. 

Over the following months, the battle descended into an attritional struggle that ended only in the November of that year.  By that time, the British had suffered 420,000 casualties, the French 195,000 and the Germans 650,000.  All this carnage resulted in a gain of only 5 miles of territory by the Allied forces.  It was a categorical failure of British military planning and tactics.

The First World War saw the birth of industrial-scale warfare, the collapse of three empires and, from a parochially British perspective, profound changes to the country’s entire social and economic make-up.  Over 16 million people (military and civilian) lost their lives and a further 20 million were wounded.  The 7 million or so civilians who died bear testimony to the birth of total war where civilians became targets as well as collateral damage.

The next few years will see the centenary of World War I and its battles, commencing next year with the 100^th anniversary of the outbreak of the war on 28 July 1914, and it doesn’t take a genius to foresee a slew of new books on the subject to add to the thousands already in existence.

Getting his shot in early is respected historian Sean McMeekin with the excellent July 1914.  In this book, Professor McMeekin drills down into the month from 28^th June 1914, on which Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie of Austria-Hungary were assassinated, to the declarations of war and, to paraphrase a British Foreign Office official, the point at which the lamps went out all over Europe.  It would take two World Wars and the collapse of the Soviet empire for them to go back on again.

When I studied World War I for my History A-level 25 years or so ago, the standard essay on the causes of the War would set out two theories and compare them.  The first theory would be the “accidental war” theory.  This would claim that, following the assassination and the rise in tensions between Russia, Serbia and Austria, a series of blunders and accidents, combined with the demands of the treaty systems then in place in Europe, led inexorably to war.  This would usually be rejected in favour of the argument that was embedded in the Treaty of Versailles, that Germany was to blame.  This view tended to centre on claims that Germany felt it was being encircled by the Triple Entente powers, that its imperial ambitions were growing and that it felt that if it delayed war for much longer than 1914 it would lose its military advantage.  I once tried to propound a theory based on economic conditions in the Balkans which was, quite rightly, laughed out of court by my teacher for being based on limited evidence which I’d also massaged.

One of the difficulties in considering the origins of the First World War is the limited reliable archival documentation that has been available to historians.  For many years, key Russian documentation lay hidden behind the Iron Curtain and the official French collection of diplomatic documents for the period is, as Professor McMeekin states, “dense farrago of distortions, omissions and lies … .”  With the benefit of increased access, July 1914 is immaculately researched and provides a new and convincing new view on the immediate causes of the War.

In the view of McMeekin, Germany was categorically not to blame, contrary to the Treaty of Versailles. Whilst accepting that the Kaiser and his key ministers made missteps (the invasion of Belgium being, in particular, a gross error), his trenchant conclusion is that, “the Germans went into it kicking and screaming as the Austrian noose snapped shut around their neck.”

In this new analysis, there is no easy culprit on whom to fix the blame.  In general terms, the political leaders of the main combatants come across as either incompetent, malign or ineffective.  Domestic concerns and local intrigues appear to play as much a role as dispassionate foreign policy demands. 

There are, however, some nations to whom more opprobrium can be attached.  Much of the impetus towards a general European war seems to come from Russia, despite Tsar Nicholas’ periodic hand-wringing.  France too is seen both to conspire with Russia and to deceive and mislead it and Britain.  Austria is portrayed as being weak and incompetent and Britain as being confused as to what it really wanted.  In the end, the overwhelming impression is of the inept Brits and Germans being dragged or conned into a war conjured up by Russia, France and Austria.

July 1914 is pacily written and conveys a real sense of the inexorable movement towards war, something that I suspect is only enhanced by the reader’s knowledge of the dreadful consequences of the political and diplomatic manoeuvring.  Without sacrificing accuracy or explanation, Professor McMeekin has produced a highly readable account that, at times, reads more like a political thriller than a work of history (and I mean that as a compliment).

As I have already mentioned, the next few years will see a welter of new works on the War.  If they are even half as good as July 1914, we are in for a treat.  I'd very much like to thank Icon Books for providing me with a copy via Netgalley

2,472: Eight Pieces of Empire by Lawrence Scott Sheets

In first part of Lawrence Scott Sheets’ memoir cum reportage of the two decades immediately following the collapse of the Soviet Union, Sheets tells of his first visit to the then-USSR in 1987 where, as a student of Russian, he lodged with a couple in one room of a collective apartment in Leningrad.  Coincidentally, I was also in Leningrad in the spring of that year.

The difference, of course, is that Sheets was a serious language student who went on to live and work in various parts of the Soviet “inner” empire, reporting on many of the ethnic conflicts and political disputes that arose in the years after Mikhail Gorbachev’s formal dissolution of the USSR on Christmas Day, 1991.  Me?  Well I was a teenager on a school trip, more intent on ensuring that the hotel bar stayed open long enough for us to get trollied every night than on the internal workings of Russia.  And I was never going to become a de facto war reporter.

Eight Pieces of Empire is divided, as the title hints, into eight sections dealing with different aspects of the collapse of the Soviet Union.  These include Georgia’s dispute with Abkhasia and then Russia itself, the Chechen struggle against Russia, the Armenian-Azerbaijani conflict, the new “sultanates” of central Asia and post-Chernobyl Ukraine.

I’m happy to say that I found it a fascinating book and I raced through it.  Given the sheer size and complexity of the former Soviet Union, Sheets was only ever going to have been witness to a fraction of its post-collapse life and Eight Pieces is a little like a pointiliste painting, where individual anecdotes sit together to make up a larger picture when one steps back to take an overview of the whole.  By telling the stories of people caught up in the post-imperial seizures of the USSR, Sheets has drawn a compelling picture of the FSU’s recent history.

I would point out that most of the book deals with the Soviet periphery and little deals directly with Russia itself.  Driven by Sheets’ journalistic assignments, it cannot deal with everything and so there is almost nothing on the wholesale theft of Russia’s resources by Yeltsin’s and Putin’s cronies or about Putin’s rise to power and his gradual undermining of the rule of law and reversion to repression.  This is a book that focuses on the warlords of the Caucasus and the new dynasties of the likes of the Aliyevs and the Nurabayevs in central Asia.

It’s also a memoir of Sheets’ life as a correspondent and, compelling as his reporting is, his personal reminiscences are just as fascinating as are his kaleidoscopic group of contacts and acquaintances.  It’s also sobering to read of a series of his friends dying as a result of the conflicts they are reporting on or otherwise caught up in.

For, ultimately, no matter how exciting the action seems or how much humour Sheets manages to extract from the situations he finds himself in, much of Eight Pieces of Empire deals with human tragedy, of innocent deaths, of the destruction of homes and the displacement of families.  The consequences of the artificial imposition of boundaries and the forced deportations and resettlements ordered by Stalin are still being played out and, without Communist repression to restrict them, ethnic and national resentments have led to war and misery.

There’s not a great deal of hope or optimism here.  Most of the conflicts on which Sheets has reported have not really been resolved and there are still more, in places of which we in the West have never heard, that are still to come.  Sheets himself has, by the end of the book, grown weary and, maybe, even a little traumatised by his experiences.  It is salutary to note that he has given up journalism and is now the director of the South Caucasus Project for the International Crisis Group, a conflict prevention organisation.

I was sent a copy of the paperback edition of Eight Pieces of Empire by the publishers, Crown, for which I am very grateful.

2,497: The Penguin Book of First World War Poetry edited by George Walter

In a world where many, if not most, “classics” can be obtained online or on e-reader for nothing or next to nothing, it may come as some surprise to hear that I would almost always prefer to pay the full price for a Penguin Classics edition.  A big reason for this is the fascinating introductory essays and explanatory notes that they tend to come with.

The Penguin Book of First World War Poetry is no exception to this and, as well as a glossary of military terms and a set of notes explaining the various cultural, historical and literary references in the poems, has an excellent introductory essay by the anthology’s editor, George Walter.

In his essay, Mr Walter summarises the conventional arc of the story of the First World War, which most of the numerous anthologies of war poems follow.  First there is the patriotic, enthusiasm of the summer of 1914, during which legions of young men volunteered to fight, fondly imagining they’d be home for Christmas.  This phase is followed by the emerging horror of trench warfare, a growth in cynicism and bitterness as the war becomes a grinding war of attrition and ends with the mourning of the dead.

Mr Walter puts this down to the crystallisation of the popular image of Wilfred Owen  and, to a lesser extent, Siegfried Sassoon as symbols of the war and to the cultural imperatives of the Sixties and Seventies when many of the anthologies were published.  He disagrees with this construct and points out that, throughout the War and for many years afterwards, the overtly patriotic Rupert Brooke was much more popular and highly regarded than Owen and Sassoon and that many soldiers retained a sense of patriotism and enthusiasm for the War until its very end.

By contrast, Mr Walter groups his selection of poems into themes, which allows him largely to avoid a strictly chronological series of poems.  He also refuses to follow the conventional narrative by collecting poems that show different viewpoints of the theme in question.  He also departs from the usual run of anthologies by acknowledging that war poetry was not only the preserve of combatants but was also created by, in particular, women.  He includes a good selection of these poems, describing the impact of the War on female lives which range from the caustic to the angry to the poignant, such as May Herschel-Clark’s The Mother, an imitation of Rupert Brooke’s The Soldier, which begins, “If you should die, think only this of me” and ends powerfully:

“And think, my son, with eyes grown clear and dry
She lives as though forever in your sight,
Loving the things you loved, with heart aglow
For country, honour, truth, traditions high,
- Proud that you paid their price. (And if some night
Her heart should break – well, lad, you will not know.)

Of course, as I have already implied, there are a host of First World War poetry anthologies out there and the question has to be asked: do we really need another?  Hopefully, I have already demonstrated that this anthology, taking as it does a different approach, is a welcome addition to other anthologies but there is another hurdle that The Penguin Book has to overcome.

As Mr Walter points out, most British schoolchildren are introduced to First World War poetry at school (although he notes with some asperity that, these days, it is more likely to be in a history class than an English class).  As school anthologies tend to contain a relatively consistent selection, this means that there is, if you like, a core of incredibly well-known poems – such as The Soldier, Anthem for Doomed Youth, Dulce et Decorum Est and I Have a Rendez-vous with Death.  This causes the would-be anthology editor a bit of a problem.  If you include all of the standards, you limit the space available for others and end up adding nothing to what has gone before.  If, on the other hand, you go for novelty and include only lesser-known poems, the anthology will feel wilfully obscure and somewhat lacking.

Mr Walter solves this conundrum with aplomb, collating a nice balance of the standard and the lesser known.  He is assisted by the fact that this anthology is substantial in length but I found a lot that was new to me, many of which were either thought-provoking or emotive.

It is interesting that the First World War remains, I believe, unique amongst conflicts in the amount, variety and quality of the poetry it generated.  I have no idea why this should be but am continually drawn to these poems.  I can’t recommend this anthology highly enough to anyone interested either in poetry in general or in the First World War.

2,499: The Missing of the Somme by Geoff Dyer

I remember being slightly stunned when I first saw my great-grandfather take off his foot and prop it up against the wall.  To my young eyes, this was a pretty cool trick to be able to pull off.  It was only later that he told me that it had been blown off during the First World War.  According to him, his commanding officer had been wounded and was lying in no-man’s land.  My great-grandfather had gone out there and had picked him up to carry him back to the British trenches when he was shot in the back and had his foot blown off.  For this, he was mentioned in despatches.

As I got older and showed more interest in history, he began to share some of his stories with me.  I am sure he gave me a sanitised version of them and, looking back, he never really talked about conditions in the trenches or the actual fighting.  In fact, as far as I can remember, he never even mentioned the names of the battles in which he fought.

And yet I confidently tell people that he was wounded in the Battle of the Somme.  I have no evidence for this and it is unlikely that I will ever have any as his military records appear to be amongst the majority of First World War army personnel records that were destroyed by German bombing in 1940.  Nevertheless, it just seems to be right to me that it was this battle that he would have been involved with.  He probably wasn’t but the received truths and symbols of that war tell me he must have been.

Geoff Dyer tells a similar story in The Missing of the Somme, a wonderfully thought-provoking meditation on the nature of remembrance and the Great War.  His family history has it that his grandfather was an underage volunteer who turned up at the recruiting office only to be told by the recruiting sergeant to go away and come back in a couple of days when he would be two years older.  This story had been faithfully passed down the generations but Dyer, having been able to find his grandfather’s records, discovered that it was completely untrue.  The image of the underage volunteer in the heady summer of 1914 has become so engrained in the collective memory of the War that we cling to it even when the facts don’t fit.

For those who haven’t come across Geoff Dyer, he is a writer who is difficult to pin down.  He is the author of a number of novels that blend fact and fiction and his non-fiction flits across whatever takes his fancy.  He claims to be inherently lazy (one of his books is entitled Yoga For People Who Can’t Be Bothered To Do It) and The Missing of the Somme was originally meant to be a novel based on Tender is the Night).  Despite all that, his writing is enviable, especially the virtuosity with which he writes about so many different subjects.  If you haven’t tried him, I recommend you give him a go.

The Missing of the Somme takes a very tangential approach to the First World War.  It starts with the opinion (with which I am in total agreement) that it was, for Britain, the defining event of the 20^th Century and that pretty much everything else is framed by it.  Received wisdom has it that the years prior to 1914 were golden and peaceful by comparison to everything that came after, an image that conveniently ignores the class unrest, the prospects of civil war in Ireland, the strikes and the militancy of the suffragettes that were features of this period.  As Dyer points out, the darkness of the War has the effect of softening what came before.

Dyer’s focus is not actually on the War itself but on the impact it has had on later generations and, in particular, the way it has been remembered.  He looks at the way that this collective memory has been framed and fixed by literature, art, photography and even architecture.  There is a section discussing how the poetry of Wilfred Owen and the writings of Siegfried Sassoon have effectively come to dominate the way we view the War and, in doing so, he points out the incongruity of the memorials that have “Dulce et Decorum est pro Patria Mori” inscribed on them in homage to the Glorious Dead.

Another point Dyer cleverly makes, although in a slightly forced way, is how the imagery of the War was being created almost before it was actually fought.  Every British person over the age of about seven or eight will be familiar with Lawrence Binyon’s words:

“They shall not grow old, as we that are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We shall remember them.”

It’s a stanza that is engraved on many war memorials and is recited at almost every Remembrance Day service every year.  I find it incredibly moving despite its familiarity and, even typing it now, my eyes have clouded.  Yet the iconic phrase of remembrance was actually written in 1914, only a few weeks after war was declared and before more than a handful of soldiers had fallen.  In a sense, it was creating the framework of memory before the fact.

Amongst the history and the discussion of remembrance, Dyer weaves in snippets of a journey he made to the battlefields of northern France and Belgium with a couple of friends.  At times, these stories can seem a bit jarring, disturbing the almost languorous rhythm of the book but, towards the end, they begin to make sense as he describes his visit to the Menin Gate at Ypres.

The Third Battle of Ypres, or Passchendaele, is, along with the Somme and Gallipoli, one of the totemic events of the War for Britain.  Although the figures are disputed, the consensus would appear to be that around 260,000 casualties were taken by both the British and German sides, with a further 10,000 French casualties.  The Menin Gate is a huge memorial to the allied casualties of all the Ypres battles whose bodies have never been found.  Stood on one of the roads that led to the front lines, the local fire brigade close the road every evening at 8 p.m. and a bugler sounds the Last Post.  This ceremony has taken place every evening since 2 July 1928 save for the years of German occupation in the Second World War.  It resumed on the very day that Polish troops liberated the town.  As a schoolboy, I visited Ypres and witnessed the ceremony.  It is simple, dignified and incredibly moving.  I can’t explain how much it means that the local community still do this.

Dyer worries about whether future generations will continue to remember.  He is a decade or so older than me and wrote The Missing of the Somme in the 1990s, wondering about what would happen when the last veterans of the War were to die.  This has now happened.  No more will we see them march past the Cenotaph on Remembrance Sunday.  The living can no longer honour their contemporaries.  Dyer writes that the dead of the British Empire would take three and a half days to march past the Cenotaph.  

Personally, I believe we will continue to remember and to honour those who fought but it will take a positive effort to ensure that future generations understand the sacrifices their ancestors made.  I suspect that almost every family in Britain, France and Germany has a direct link to the War in their history and it would be a real tragedy if the losses and suffering were to be forgotten.

The Missing of the Somme is a brilliant encapsulation of thoughts about the War and its effects on Britain and, despite not being a history book or a memoir, I think it should be required reading for anyone studying the War or who is interested in it.  For those who are interested but have little time to spend with the voluminous literature on it, I would recommend a trio of short books:  Norman Stone’s World War One: A Short History, Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front and Dyer’s The Missing of the Somme.

I read The Missing of the Somme for the 2012 Reading Challenge at War Through the Generations.

2,529: Ten Days That Shook The World by John Reed

There’s a moment at the very end of John Reed’s first-hand account of Russia’s October Revolution of 1917 that made me give an involuntary groan.  The bolsheviki have assumed power in Petersburg and Moscow and the Revolution is, at least for now.  The workers, peasants and soldiers come together to celebrate and to look forward with unbridled optimism to a socialist future and the creation of a better society.

It’s hard for the modern reader, whatever their political views, not to draw breath and feel a sense of foreboding when reading this scene as we know that the innocent optimism expressed here will soon be beaten into submission by the ascension of Stalin, the corruption and repression of the Soviet system and the impact of a sclerotic economy.

Although John Reed was working as a journalist for an American socialist newspaper in covering the Russian Revolution, he is open about his engagement in it.  Reed was no mere observer but, at least in moral and political terms, a participant.  He may not have acted physically to help the Revolution along but it is clear in his writing (and is admitted by him) that he was in sympathy with the Bolsheviks.

At times, this is awkwardly obvious as his strained attempts to put the Bolsheviks on the moral high ground show.  His closeness to the new regime can also be seen in the fact that, after his untimely death in 1920, he was buried a hero of the revolution in the Kremlin.

Nevertheless, despite his obvious bias, Ten Days That Shook The World remains probably the leading first-hand account of the October revolution.  It is important to note, and sometimes overlooked, that this was not a revolution against the Tsar – he had abdicated following the February Revolution – but was a revolution against the provisional government of Kerensky that had been formed amongst the political parties other than some of this on the far left.

Disaffection had set in with the policies of this government which did not appear to its critics to be radical or socialist enough and the Soviets, essentially workers’ councils, had grown to be a competing source of power.

Reed’s book tells vividly of the rising tension between government, Soviets and people in Petrograd (the new, less German name for Petersburg) in the months after Lenin’s return from exile in Germany in April 1917.  Increased suffering by the Russian army on the Eastern Front with Germany and a number of domestic crises reduced the ability of the provisional government to exercise power and enabled Lenin’s Bolsheviks to increase their influence to a point where, in the chaos into which Petrograd had fallen by October 1917, the Bolsheviks were able to emerge and take control of Russia.

There is a real immediacy and pace to Reed’s writing and even though I knew what was going to happen and even though I despise everything the Bolsheviks were, it still had me willing them on.  The journalist in Reed was also skilled in telling part of the story through encounters he had with individuals.

Reed’s view was that the October Revolution was led by the workers and rank and file soldiers who almost dragged the politicians along, even outrunning many of the Bolsheviks in their revolutionary fervour.  I am slightly cynical about this but the overall tone of the book suggests the Bolsheviks taking power, not after a carefully planned coup, but almost accidentally, having been carried along by events and simply being the most decisive political group.  Indeed, the iconic storming of the Winter Palace is depicted as nothing of the sort.  Reed’s description has the Bolsheviks pretty much walking in and assuming power by virtue of just giving clear instructions to functionaries.  In many ways, Reed’s Bolsheviks were beneficiaries of the inchoate will of the people rather than being a conscious popular choice.  In light of what would come next, I found myself at various points in Reed’s text lamenting the coincidences and the indecisiveness of other political groups and marvelling at the seemingly tiny decisions and events that enabled Lenin to take control and the Communist Party then to wield absolute power for the next three quarters of a century.

Another startling point coming out of Ten Days That Shook The World is the lack of importance of Stalin in the narrative of the Revolution.  Given that, for many people, the Revolution was really just a stage setter for Stalin’s brutal rule, it is notable that he only merits two mentions in the text, one of which is just as part of a list of Commissars and the other as a counter-signatory of a letter.  Trotsky, Stalin’s great enemy is far more present in this narrative, which may be one reason why, despite Lenin’s endorsement of Reed’s book, it was banned in the Soviet Union by Stalin.

This book is essential reading for anyone interested in Russia or that period in history.  I’m also a great believer that we can find lessons for today in history and would recommend it to politicians in the UK and Europe today as a warning of how general unrest and disaffection with government can spiral into a full-blown uprising without any conscious plan, potentially enabling an opportunistic but determined minority party to fill the void.  It led to catastrophe in Russia – let’s hope nothing similar happens here in these troubled times.

2,539: A Line in the Sand by James Barr

James Barrs’ new book, A Line in the Sand, is a fascinating study of the way that France and Britain schemed and intrigued against each other from the First World War through to the end of the 1940s to maintain their influence in the Middle East and, in doing so, laid many of the seeds that would grow into today’s Middle East conflicts.

It opens with the Sykes-Picot agreement of 1916, in which Sykes, a British chancer of a politician and Picot, a monomaniacal French diplomat, carved up the Ottoman Empire’s Middle Eastern holdings between the two countries (save for a small Russian interest) with no concern at all for the inhabitants of the region, a behaviour pattern that would repeat itself throughout the period of the mandates that the League of Nations gave to the two countries in the region.

It’s a particularly unedifying story, from which no one emerges with much credit, save, possibly, T.E. Lawrence, who was at least consistent in his desire for Arab independence.  The British come across as deceitful and inconsistent, advocating Arab independence when it suited them in order to undermine the French mandates in Syria and Lebanon, but promising the French their support to maintain their mandates when French support in the World Wars was seen as more necessary.  The role we played in the creation of the state of Israel also comes under scrutiny and our undignified haste to depart Palestine at the end of the mandate opened the way to the opening of massive violence between the Israelis and the Palestinians.  It was a shambolic and cowardly exit.

For all of that, the Arabs and Israelis are hardly guilt-free either.  The Arabs are portrayed as often being as interested in their own internal squabbles as with gaining independence with many of them were happy to compromise for money or promises of power within a British or French controlled area.  The Israelis are shown as ruthless terrorists (or freedom fighters, depending on your point of view), happy to murder British soldiers and civilians and being responsible for massacres of Arabs, particularly at Deir Yassin.  Barr even recounts how some Jewish militants offered to fight the British on behalf of Hitler, in return for his support for a Jewish state, something that beggars belief in hindsight.

But the real core of Barr’s story is the friction between the British and the French.  Whereas Britain appears to have been more focused on protecting its sources of oil and its Indian possessions, the French were more about the eternal glory of France and maintaining its influence in the world as a great power.  As well as generally undermining the British mandate in Palestine, they were prepared to fund, arm and provide refuge for the Jewish guerrillas who were carrying out attacks on British people inside Palestine in order to get revenge for their perceived humiliation by Britain in the Levant.  It is a truly sickening tale which even made me, a confirmed Francophile, angry and bitter.  Although there are no good guys in this book, the French come across as the worst of the bad guys, with a cast of characters, including de Gaulle himself, who were fanatical about maintaining French prestige, regardless of the cost.

A Line in the Sand is a fascinating book, both readable and scholarly, and should be read by anyone with an interest in the Middle East.  He has had access to previously unreleased papers which shed light on how the Anglo-French frictions played such a large part in the creation of the modern Middle East.  Indeed, the naked hostility that the two nominal allies had for each other in the region came as a surprise to me.

I’m generally a bit of a cynic about politicians and this book has only confirmed me in this view.  Morality, decency and honesty all took a back seat in the dealings of Britain and France in the region and the whole, depressing conclusion that I have to draw is that the Middle East may well have been a more peaceful place had we and the French not got involved.  It was not one of the most glorious episodes in either country’s history.

I was provided with an electronic ARC by W.W. Norton & Company, Barr’s American publisher, for which I am very grateful.

2,574: The American Civil War by Sir John Keegan

The American Civil War claimed the lives of over 820,000 Americans, including some 30% of all Southern men between the ages of 18 and 40 and 10% of all Northern men between 20 and 45.  It ran for 4 years and encompassed as many as 10,000 battles.  It was fought over vast areas of land and, if anyone had been paying attention in Europe, presaged many of the military and technological developments that were later to turn Northern France and Belgium into the charnel houses of the First World War.

By any measure, this was a major historical event, either the first modern war or the last old war, depending on your point of view.  It remains the only large scale, civil war fought in a democratic nation.  Yet I, like most Britons, was almost wholly ignorant of it.  Sure, I had heard of Gettysburg and Antietam.  I knew about Lincoln, that he made the Gettysburg Address and that he wanted to abolish slavery in the South.  The names of Jackson, Lee and Grant were familiar.  However, I really didn’t know much about it, certainly by comparison to the Napoleonic Wars or the First and Second World Wars and, as a keen reader about history felt this gap in my knowledge keenly.

So, a Christmas gift of Sir John Keegan’s single-volume history of the American Civil War and the fact that the Civil War forms the War Through the Generations 2011 theme gave me the kickstart I needed to start finding out about this conflict.

For those of you who are not aware of him, Sir John Keegan is a British military historian who is widely regarded as one of the leading military historians of our time.  His book, The Face of Battle, has been credited with changing the way in which historians approach the writing of military history and, in addition to having been the senior lecturer in military history at the Royal Military Academy, Sandhurst, he has also held professorships at Yale and Vassar colleges in the US.

With this pedigree and having enjoyed several of his earlier books, I was really looking forward to his take on the Civil War.  I thought that, as a non-American writer, he might have a fresh perspective to bring to the table.  Yet, overall, I came away feeling slightly disappointed.

The American Civil War is not, strictly speaking, a narrative history of the war.  It sets out to answer certain questions relating to the war such as why was the war fought the way it was, could the South have ever won, why did members of the same nation fight each other so intensely.  Nevertheless, in order to answer these questions, it was necessary for Keegan to deal with the chronology and this is where the problems start.

The book seems to be split into roughly three sections: six chapters setting the scene and dealing with the run-up to the outbreak of war, 9 chapters dealing with the chronology of the war and then 6 thematic chapters dealing with specific aspects of the war such as the experience of the black soldier, the military leaderships of the two sides and a quirky little chapter on Walt Whitman.  The book ends with a rather cursory chapter wrapping up the end of the war and setting out some of his conclusions.

This structure creates two problems.  Firstly, it is, frankly, impossible to cram a proper narrative, even in summary form, of the Civil War into 9 chapters of a book which is only 365 pages in total.  The amount of information he has had to cram into this part makes it confusing and difficult to follow in parts and, conversely, he has had to leave out so much that it becomes unhelpful to the novice and facile for the expert.  Having said that, his section on the Battle of Gettysburg is a wonderful piece of descriptive writing.

The second problem with the structure is that of repetition.  As he moves from the narrative to the thematic chapters, he is forced to repeat much of what he has said earlier in order to explain his themes fully.  This is very irritating.

Where Keegan is excellent is in the insights he brings to the war.  He is able to use the breadth of his historical knowledge to draw comparisons with other conflicts ranging from the Napoleonic Wars through to Vietnam.  He also emphasises the degree to which the war was dictated by the physical geography of the theatre of war.  Not only did this drive the strategy of both sides but it also impacted upon individual tactics and was a key factor in the number of casualties.  Keegan highlights Grant’s ability to deal with the topography of the battleground as one of his leading qualities.

Keegan is very good at analysing the various military commanders on each side.  His conclusion is that there were two outstanding Union commanders in Grant and Sherman and one on the Confederate side in Lee who he rates just behind the Union two.  Otherwise, he is rather dismissive of the majority of the main generals, especially on the Union side.  His admiration of Grant knows no bounds and he skims over his willingness to send large numbers of men to their deaths.  Indeed, Keegan contends that driving the body count up on both sides and the depredations of Sherman’s March to the Sea were necessary elements of the Union’s eventual victory and appears to approve of Sherman’s notion that the war had to be carried to the civilian population of the South, although many Americans might bristle at his comparison of this to Hitler’s progress through Eastern Europe in 1941.  Nevertheless, there are echoes of what would become known as total war in Sherman’s campaign and Keegan has a point when he says that the key to victory was not to destroy Confederate cities, industries or even armies but to break the Southern mind.

He also draws a clear distinction between the Civil War and the First World War, with which it is often compared.  He writes:

"The Great War is always spoken of with regret in Europe.  It is the Continent's tragedy, the cause of many of its persisting troubles, the war without justification or point.  No such regrets attach to the Civil War, which is remembered as the struggle which completed the Revolution and made possible the realisation of the ideals on which the Founding Fathers launched the republic in the 1770s."

Unfortunately, Keegan’s insights and analysis are outweighed by contradictions in the text and also a number of fairly fundamental inaccuracies.  By way of example, he comments on the deep hostility that existed between soldiers on the two sides by stating that the Union treated the Confederate dead worse than the Germans and the Western Allies treated the dead of the other side in the World Wars but then misinterprets Lincoln’s Gettysburg address by claiming it was reconciliatory.  He argues that it praised the dead of both sides when even I know that it was only aimed at the Union dead. Also, and most egregiously for a British historian, he not only gets the name of the British Prime Minsiter of the time wrong but also places him in the wrong political party.  Not good at all.

When Keegan’s book came out around eighteen months ago, it had a mixed reception.  The non-American press (mainly British and Australian) gave it broadly favourable reviews whereas American reviewers were largely critical, notably this scathing (and a little mean-spirited) review by James McPherson in the New York Times.  Some blog commentators even went as far as to claim that non-Americans shouldn’t write about the Civil War, which seems a little parochial and small-minded to me.

Ultimately, I think The American Civil War has to be judged a failure and a rare disappointment amongst Keegan’s oeuvre.  I shall be turning later in the year to McPherson’s Battle Cry of Freedom to be my narrative guide to the Civil War and will also be reading Amanda Foreman’s A World on Fire.  This is a transatlantic view of the Civil War, dealing with the way Britain reacted to it and how it affected relations between the two countries.  If you are new to Keegan, do not be put off but, instead, turn to either The Face of Battle or The Mask of Command, both far better pieces.