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The First World War, by John Keegan
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The First World War created the modern world. A conflict of unprecedented ferocity, it abruptly ended the relative peace and prosperity of the Victorian era, unleashing such demons of the twentieth century as mechanized warfare and mass death. It also helped to usher in the ideas that have shaped our times--modernism in the arts, new approaches to psychology and medicine, radical thoughts about economics and society--and in so doing shattered the faith in rationalism and liberalism that had prevailed in Europe since the Enlightenment. With The First World War, John Keegan, one of our most eminent military historians, fulfills a lifelong ambition to write the definitive account of the Great War for our generation.
Probing the mystery of how a civilization at the height of its achievement could have propelled itself into such a ruinous conflict, Keegan takes us behind the scenes of the negotiations among Europe's crowned heads (all of them related to one another by blood) and ministers, and their doomed efforts to defuse the crisis. He reveals how, by an astonishing failure of diplomacy and communication, a bilateral dispute grew to engulf an entire continent.
But the heart of Keegan's superb narrative is, of course, his analysis of the military conflict. With unequalled authority and insight, he recreates the nightmarish engagements whose names have become legend--Verdun, the Somme and Gallipoli among them--and sheds new light on the strategies and tactics employed, particularly the contributions of geography and technology. No less central to Keegan's account is the human aspect. He acquaints us with the thoughts of the intriguing personalities who oversaw the tragically unnecessary catastrophe--from heads of state like Russia's hapless tsar, Nicholas II, to renowned warmakers such as Haig, Hindenburg and Joffre. But Keegan reserves his most affecting personal sympathy for those whose individual efforts history has not recorded--"the anonymous millions, indistinguishably drab, undifferentially deprived of any scrap of the glories that by tradition made the life of the man-at-arms tolerable."
By the end of the war, three great empires--the Austro-Hungarian, the Russian and the Ottoman--had collapsed. But as Keegan shows, the devastation ex-tended over the entirety of Europe, and still profoundly informs the politics and culture of the continent today. His brilliant, panoramic account of this vast and terrible conflict is destined to take its place among the classics of world history.
With 24 pages of photographs, 2 endpaper maps, and 15 maps in text
- Sales Rank: #28783 in Books
- Color: Multicolor
- Brand: Keegan, John
- Published on: 2000-05-16
- Released on: 2000-05-16
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.00" h x 1.10" w x 5.20" l, 1.08 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 528 pages
Amazon.com Review
Despite the avalanche of books written about the First World War in recent years, there have been comparatively few books that deliver a comprehensive account of the war and its campaigns from start to finish. The First World War fills the gap superbly. As readers familiar with Keegan's previous books (including The Second World War and Six Armies in Normandy) know, he's a historian of the old school. He has no earth-shattering new theories to challenge the status quo, no first-person accounts to tug on the emotions--what he does have, though, is a gift for talking the lay person through the twists and turns of a complex narrative in a way that is never less than accessible or engaging.
Keegan never tries to ram his learning down your throat. Where other authors have struggled to explain how Britain could ever allow itself to be dragged into such a war in 1914, Keegan keeps his account practical. The level of communications that we enjoy today just didn't exist then, and so it was much harder to keep track of what was going on. By the time a message had finally reached the person in question, the situation may have changed out of all recognition. Keegan applies this same "cock-up" theory of history to the rest of the war, principally the three great disasters at Gallipoli, the Somme, and Passchendaele. The generals didn't send all those troops to their deaths deliberately, Keegan argues; they did it out of incompetence and ineptitude, and because they had no idea of what was actually going on at the front.
While The First World War is not afraid to point the finger at those generals who deserve it, even Keegan has to admit he doesn't have all the answers. If it all seems so obviously futile and such a massive waste of life now, he asks, how could it have seemed worthwhile back then? Why did so many people carry on, knowing they would die? Why, indeed. --John Crace, Amazon.co.uk
From Publishers Weekly
In a riveting narrative that puts diaries, letters and action reports to good use, British military historian Keegan (The Face of Battle, etc.) delivers a stunningly vivid history of the Great War. He is equally at easeAand equally generous and sympatheticAprobing the hearts and minds of lowly soldiers in the trenches or examining the thoughts and motivations of leaders (such as Joffre, Haig and Hindenburg) who directed the maelstrom. In the end, Keegan leaves us with a brilliant, panoramic portrait of an epic struggle that was at once noble and futile, world-shaking and pathetic. The war was unnecessary, Keegan writes, because the train of events that led to it could have been derailed at any time, "had prudence or common goodwill found a voice." And it was tragic, consigning 10 million to their graves, destroying "the benevolent and optimistic culture" of Europe and sowing the seeds of WWII. While Niall Ferguson's The Pity of War (Forecasts, Mar. 8) offers a revisionist, economic interpretation of the causes of WWI, Keegan stands impressively mute before the unanswerable question he poses: "Why did a prosperous continent, at the height of its success as a source and agent of global wealth and power and at one of the peaks of its intellectual and cultural achievement, choose to risk all it had won for itself and all it offered to the world in the lottery of a vicious and local internecine conflict?" Photos not seen by PW. 75,000-copy first printing; simultaneous Random House audio. (June)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From School Library Journal
Grade 9 Up-John Keegan's account of the Great War for our generation.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Most helpful customer reviews
159 of 168 people found the following review helpful.
Good for what it is
By Felix Sonderkammer
As a one-volume narrative outlining the major events of the First World War, this book succeeds. It is a great introduction to the war. I wish, however, to state my reservations about the book.
One oddity is that the first three chapters cover the events leading to the war, but the last chapter ends abruptly with the armistice. It would have been nice to have a chapter on the Treaty of Versailles.
The book incorporates two previously published articles, as the acknowledgements acknowledge. This leads to the repetition of certain data, as it appears that they were not sufficiently edited to fit in with the rest of the book.
Keegan is British, and it is obvious. He emphasizes repeatedly how the British army was never defeated by the Germans except in one campaign. The Australians are praised as the world's greatest soldiers without further elaboration. He explicitly blames Germany's naval construction campaign preceding the war for the war itself, presumably because it challenged Britain's benign supremacy. The deaths of British soldiers are lamented with poignancy that overflows into sentimentality.
To be fair, the book was written for a British audience, and these excesses are much more modest than they might have been. Keegan seems to have tried hard to be evenhanded, and these excesses are largely superficial and forgivable.
Lastly, Keegan admits that this book does not break new ground. A glance at the endnotes reveals that most of the material from this book was taken from secondary sources. Each chapter seems to have come from three or so books. Thus, this is not a work of history so much as a gloss on history written by others.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful.
I wanted to read a general overview of WWI in order to get a better understanding of how this major event shaped our current ...
By Tyler Morgan
I try to complete every book I begin reading, but I had to give up on this one after about 150 pages. I wanted to read a general overview of WWI in order to get a better understanding of how this major event shaped our current world. This book did not fit the bill, as it is instead a very detailed work filled with the minutiae of WWI battles without much context or narrative to keep the reader interested. Perhaps I should have known that this book would be more focused on the tactical detail of battle and steered clear, but at the same time, even after I realized this book was more of a military history, I tried to stick it out. However, the book is so devoid of any humanizing details and so full of arbitrary information that means nothing to the average reader that I had to call it quits and just accept the fact that my time is better spent reading something else. I hate to write a bad review for this book, given that the writing (grammatically / stylistically) is very good IMO, but I felt that overall the book has been over-hyped on Amazon and in other reviews. If you are looking for a good general overview of WWI and how it shaped the 20th and 21st centuries, you need to look elsewhere.
13 of 14 people found the following review helpful.
An excellent introduction to the history of WWI
By Christopher Farrell
This book is John Keegan doing what John Keegan does best: presenting eminently readable, thoroghly engaging and thought-provoking military history. As Americans, we tend to get a fairly whitewashed history of WWI from school and Hollywood. My early education amounted to a cursory overview plus Paths of Glory and Gallipoli. Both outstanding and compelling movies, certainly, but not exactly sound historical grounding in a dramatic and crucial historical period. This book fills in the gap as an excellent introductory yet serious history of World War I.
For me, prior to this book WWI equalled trench warfare, and the big question was how these people managed to persist in such unchanging futility for over 4 years. That was about it. Of course, there is an element of truth there, but the whole affair is far more complex. The four years of war saw dramatic advances in tactics and equipment such that warfare in 1918 was barely recognizable next to warfare in 1914. Keegan helps to enlighten us as to the course of the war, the horrible problems both leaders and soldiers labored under that give rise to trench warfare, and the many different attempts to break it.
Keegan's exploration of the causes and after- effects of the war are typically thoughtful, and I think one of his key strengths is his ability to bring together military, social, and political history. What I like is that he manages to discuss these topics at just the right level: detailed enough to be complete and informative, yet brief enough to be readable. When he talks about mobilization schedules and the failings of the pre-war power structures, he gives you enough information to make his points and point out facinating details, and yet only very rarely get bogged down in minutiae.
John Keegan's writing style can be a little difficult at times. His average sentence length is a bit on the high side and he does occasionally abuse commas. The key is just to persist until you've normalized it. When I first started reading his books, I found the style a little disconcerting, but once I had read 50 pages or so I had sublimated it and just enjoyed his fairly lively prose (for history, anyway!).
If you like this book, John Keegan's "The Second World War" is a similarly excellent "survey history" of WWII, and the first sections of it compliment this book very nicely.
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