HISTORY

MAXEGREMONT

TERROR OF THE TRENCHES

WORLDWARONE: A SHORTHISTORY

★By Norman Stone (Allen Lane / The Penguin Press 186pp £16.99)

DIARYOFADEADOFFICER: BEINGTHE POSTHUMOUS PAPERS OF ARTHURGRAEMEWEST

★

By Arthur Graeme West Introduction by Nigel Jones (Greenhill Books 192pp £19.99)

DOWENEEDanother history of the First World War? The answer in the case of Norman Stone’s short book is, yes – because of its opinionated freshness and the unusual, sharp facts that fly about like shrapnel. How good to learn, for instance, that the taxi drivers who took French troops to the front in the crisis of September 1914 – the famous taxis of the Marne – kept their meters running and that the German commander Hindenburg, dependent on his staff, thought he had so much time on his hands in August 1918 that he asked his wife to send him various classics of German literature. Such zooming into close-up lets particular incidents illustrate lasting truths, like the self-serving venality of Parisian taxi drivers, a foretaste of Vichy, and the essentially symbolic role of the vain, lazy Field Marshal who, when President of Germany in 1933, allowed himself to be manipulated into appointing Hitler as Chancellor. Norman Stone must be tired of being compared to the late A J P Taylor. But he shares that master of narrative history’s eye for the key detail and propensity for short sentences, without Taylor’s irritating, and sometimes frivolous, obsession with paradox or admiration for the old Soviet Union. Like Taylor, Stone keeps things moving, encapsulating the First World War in 157 pages. He does not concentrate too much on the western front but gives welcome attention to what happened in the east, with the Russians and (his particular expertise) the Turks. On two much-discussed questions – whether Britain should have stayed out and whether Germany was,

British gas-masked machine-gun unit on the Somme, 1916

before 1914, dominated by a sinister military caste – Stone dwells only briefly. The facts are that not only did Britain have treaty obligations to neutral Belgium, which the Germans invaded, but Germany, partly through the hysterical rhetoric of Kaiser Wilhelm II, had forfeited enough trust to make reasonable calculation of its behaviour impossible. Although admirable in its education system, culture, scientific achievement and humane attitude to its industrial workers, German policy was much influenced by a military high command. The Generals feared that the burgeoning economic strength of Russia could thwart German ambitions to be a great, perhaps the greatest, world power. It was this military dominance, and aggressive German rearmament, that created a ridiculous state of affairs – a British preference for an alliance with absolutist, politically backward Czarist Russia against what was, in many ways, the most progressive state in Europe. On the German side, as if to show this absurdity, there were last-minute doubts. The Kaiser panicked and Bethmann-Hollweg, the German Chancellor, gave orders that slow-growing elms should not be planted on his Brandenburg estate because the Russians would profit from these when they eventually took possession of it, as they did in 1945. At the start the British could send only a small Expeditionary Force to join the huge conscripted European armies, because Britain had no national service. The main British contribution was to be the Royal Navy, which imposed an economic blockade on the enemy. Stone doubts the effectiveness of this, saying that it encouraged industrial productivity in Germany. But he cannot avoid the socalled turnip winter of 1916–17, when many Germans and Austrians went hungry. This he turns slightly to Germany’s advantage, saying that it became a powerful propaganda weapon, inducing hatred of the enemy, like the bombing of the German cities in the Second World War. It was the Germans who mastered the tactics of the new mechanised warfare first. They had startling military successes, even early on, in August 1914 against the Russians in East Prussia and in 1917 against the Italians at Caporetto. In March 1918 they momentarily broke the deadlock on the western front. The British fared less well. Neither Gallipoli nor the Somme nor Passchendaele can be dressed up as great victories, even by Winston Churchill’s or Douglas Haig’s greatest admirers. Haig, admittedly, had to cope with thousands of completely

LITERARY REVIEW August 2007

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