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The Times Higher Education Supplement
September 7, 2007
BOOKS; Pg. 26 No. 1810
Tragedy and farce meet in the trenches
A. W. Purdue
World War One: A Short History
By Norman Stone
Allen Lane 187pp, £ 16.99
ISBN 9781846140136
Published July 26, 2007
Norman Stone's World War One: A Short History is, indeed, at about
40,000 words, a short history of a long war. It provides an excellent
introduction for readers new to the field, and specialists will enjoy
the insights, sweeping judgments, piquant asides and humour we have
come to expect from an unconventional historian. This is a synthesis
based on profound knowledge that is lightly, some would say too
lightly, worn.
As the author of The Eastern Front 1914-1917 (1975), Stone's account
corrects the over-emphasis on the Western front that characterises
the British image of the war. Here, not only the Eastern Front but
also the much-neglected Italian Front are given proper weight.
Writing, as he tells us, from his desk overlooking the Bosphorus, he
also gives attention to the Turkish role in the war, which is too
often confined by British historians to accounts of Gallipoli. It is
a pity, however, that he didn't look further east. An overview of the
war in the Ottoman Empire's Arab provinces would, given Stone's
knowledge of Turkey's war, have been welcome. Controversy and Stone
are far from strangers, and the book's description of the Turks'
treatment of the Armenians as a "massacre" has already upset
Armenians who insist that it was genocide.
Few histories of the tragic conflict are strong on humour, but Stone
punctuates his account with wry asides pointing to the absurd and the
mundane amid carnage and death. Far from being consecutive as Marx
alleged, tragedy and farce are entwined in this history. Thus we have
the Bolsheviks remembering that they needed a "delegate from the
peasantry" to make up their team for the negotiations that led to the
Treaty of Brest- Litovsk and picking up a hard-drinking peasant from
the street; he got on well with the Austrian aristocrats who "asked
him about the planting of onions". Then there's the Tsar, licking his
own postage stamps to help the war effort, and the German Chancellor
concerned about his travelling expenses in the crucial month of July
1914. Many document exercises have been set for history
undergraduates based on the peace treaties signed in Paris but surely
none on the article of the Treaty of Sevres, which, Stone tells us,
provided for the suppression of dirty postcards.
The author's tone is humane and generous. He gives full recognition
to the ghastly nature and futility of the war but doesn't fulminate
at the failings of generals or the mistakes of statesmen. If the
generals are not mocked in an Oh What a Lovely War fashion, this is
not a full-blooded revisionist account, and even the best generals
are seen to have failed when, having made advances, they didn't know
when to stop. There are no saints or real sinners in this account,
but fallible men with vaster armies than they had been trained to use
and monarchs entrapped by their own rhetoric into impasse. Stone is
surely wrong, however, to see the desire for expanded frontiers as
the root cause of the war. Fear of possible futures in which allies
disintegrated and enemies grew stronger were more important, while
the war aims of the combatants were largely developed after the war
had begun.
Such a short book has inevitably lots of omissions: the long war in
Africa doesn't rate a mention, while the war at sea is also, save for
Jutland, rather neglected. Perhaps this short history should have
been just a bit longer, yet extra length might have altered its
character. It reads as if it were written easily and quickly by an
author enjoying writing it - a longish seminar given by a real expert
who never bores his students.
- A. W. Purdue is a visiting senior lecturer at the Open University.
September 7, 2007
BOOKS; Pg. 26 No. 1810
Tragedy and farce meet in the trenches
A. W. Purdue
World War One: A Short History
By Norman Stone
Allen Lane 187pp, £ 16.99
ISBN 9781846140136
Published July 26, 2007
Norman Stone's World War One: A Short History is, indeed, at about
40,000 words, a short history of a long war. It provides an excellent
introduction for readers new to the field, and specialists will enjoy
the insights, sweeping judgments, piquant asides and humour we have
come to expect from an unconventional historian. This is a synthesis
based on profound knowledge that is lightly, some would say too
lightly, worn.
As the author of The Eastern Front 1914-1917 (1975), Stone's account
corrects the over-emphasis on the Western front that characterises
the British image of the war. Here, not only the Eastern Front but
also the much-neglected Italian Front are given proper weight.
Writing, as he tells us, from his desk overlooking the Bosphorus, he
also gives attention to the Turkish role in the war, which is too
often confined by British historians to accounts of Gallipoli. It is
a pity, however, that he didn't look further east. An overview of the
war in the Ottoman Empire's Arab provinces would, given Stone's
knowledge of Turkey's war, have been welcome. Controversy and Stone
are far from strangers, and the book's description of the Turks'
treatment of the Armenians as a "massacre" has already upset
Armenians who insist that it was genocide.
Few histories of the tragic conflict are strong on humour, but Stone
punctuates his account with wry asides pointing to the absurd and the
mundane amid carnage and death. Far from being consecutive as Marx
alleged, tragedy and farce are entwined in this history. Thus we have
the Bolsheviks remembering that they needed a "delegate from the
peasantry" to make up their team for the negotiations that led to the
Treaty of Brest- Litovsk and picking up a hard-drinking peasant from
the street; he got on well with the Austrian aristocrats who "asked
him about the planting of onions". Then there's the Tsar, licking his
own postage stamps to help the war effort, and the German Chancellor
concerned about his travelling expenses in the crucial month of July
1914. Many document exercises have been set for history
undergraduates based on the peace treaties signed in Paris but surely
none on the article of the Treaty of Sevres, which, Stone tells us,
provided for the suppression of dirty postcards.
The author's tone is humane and generous. He gives full recognition
to the ghastly nature and futility of the war but doesn't fulminate
at the failings of generals or the mistakes of statesmen. If the
generals are not mocked in an Oh What a Lovely War fashion, this is
not a full-blooded revisionist account, and even the best generals
are seen to have failed when, having made advances, they didn't know
when to stop. There are no saints or real sinners in this account,
but fallible men with vaster armies than they had been trained to use
and monarchs entrapped by their own rhetoric into impasse. Stone is
surely wrong, however, to see the desire for expanded frontiers as
the root cause of the war. Fear of possible futures in which allies
disintegrated and enemies grew stronger were more important, while
the war aims of the combatants were largely developed after the war
had begun.
Such a short book has inevitably lots of omissions: the long war in
Africa doesn't rate a mention, while the war at sea is also, save for
Jutland, rather neglected. Perhaps this short history should have
been just a bit longer, yet extra length might have altered its
character. It reads as if it were written easily and quickly by an
author enjoying writing it - a longish seminar given by a real expert
who never bores his students.
- A. W. Purdue is a visiting senior lecturer at the Open University.