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'The First World War' by John Keegan

Conclusions are missing in action

Sunday, August 29, 1999

By Len Barcousky, Post-Gazette Staff Writer

	The First World War By John Keegan Alfred A. Knopf $35.00

Eighty-five years ago this weekend, German troops achieved one of the most lopsided successes of World War I: The encirclement and destruction of the Russian Second Army.

In five days, 50,000 Russians were killed or wounded, while another 92,000 were taken prisoner. Paul von Hindenburg, the German commander, took special satisfaction in the location of the victory, near a East Prussian village called Tannenberg. Tannenberg had been the site of a spectacular defeat of German-speaking Teutonic knights by a Polish-Lithuanian army in 1410.

There are so many great battles to be described, however, that John Keegan devotes only about a dozen pages of his history to the opening struggle in the East. “The [Tannenberg] casualty list, already greatly exceeded by those in the West, was unremarkable by the standards of campaigns yet to come,” he writes.

“The First World War” makes for depressing reading. By 1916, many of the battles, especially on the Western Front, blend together. To paraphrase Stalin, one death is a tragedy; the wholesale destruction of regiments becomes a statistic.

Yet the war remains one of the key events of the century. As Keegan and many other historians note, it produced the unprecedented social turmoil, poverty, political instability, bitterness and desire for revenge that led directly to World War II. The twin triumphs of communism in Russia and Nazism in Germany had their birth in the flames of World War I.

Ironies abound. Keegan writes that the Germans, following the fatally flawed Schlieffen Plan, expected that a quick victory in France would be followed by a protracted struggle in the vast spaces of Russia. Instead, they beat the Russians badly, then faced four years of stalemate in the West.

Consider the Battle of the Somme, a five-month struggle for a few miles of muddy French fields in 1916. The pointless attacks ordered by Gen. Douglas Haig resulted in more than 400,000 British casualties, the greatest military disaster in that nation’s history.

The experience of the Somme goes far in explaining why Winston Churchill was so reluctant to launch a second front against German positions in Normandy during World War II. Neither he nor the British public could endure a repeat of the wholesale slaughter that had emptied towns and villages of young men 30 years earlier.

Despite their post-war complaints of a stab in the back by politicians, the Kaiser’s generals knew the game was up by autumn 1918, Keegan notes. The Germans had risked all on ending the war before American troops could arrive to reinforce the exhausted Allies. Their final attacks gained little.

“After four years of war in which they had destroyed the Tsar’s army, trounced the Italians and the Romanians, demoralized the French and, at the very least, denied the British a clear-cut victory, they were now confronted with an [American] army whose soldiers sprang, in uncountable numbers, as if from soil strewn with dragons’ teeth,” Keegan writes.

While concentrating on the Western Front, Keegan doesn’t ignore the war at sea and in Eastern Europe, Asia and Africa. He is the author of more than a dozen books, and throughout this latest work, his writing is insightful and his descriptions clear.

Keegan has a convincing explanation of why the slaughter was so great and why neither side could gain much advantage in the West: Rapid-fire weapons gave nearly unbeatable advantage to entrenched troops.

Without tanks to provide cover or accurate battlefield communications to coordinate artillery fire with infantry attacks, defenders could not be dislodged.

But when it comes to unraveling the why of the war, Keegan admits he is stumped. Each of the Western allies and the Central Powers entered the conflict for a different reason. All expected a speedy resolution, and all saw those hopes dashed.

“Why, when the hope of bringing the conflict to a quick and decisive conclusion was everywhere dashed … did the combatants decide, nevertheless, to persist in their military effort, to mobilize for total war and eventually to commit the totality of their young manhood to mutual and existentially pointless slaughter?” he asks.

Answering this question may require not a historian but, depending on your predilection, a psychiatrist or a priest.