The Guns of August

 

The Guns of August – by Barbara W. Tuchman

Overall I was a bit disappointed with this one.  It’s not that it was a bad book, it was actually quite good.  In fact, it was VERY good in places.  I think my problem was the book’s reputation and all of the  accolades it received.  It’s supposedly “one of the best books ever on World War I”.  It even won a Pulitzer prize.  I didn’t think it was THAT good, and to be fair, it was probably one of the least satisfying books of the first world war that I have read.

This book doesn’t even cover the entire war.  As the word “August” in the title implies, it basically only focuses on the first month of the war.  There’s a lot here that details what happened prior to the war, and for me, those portions were far more interesting.  I suppose other readers may differ in their opinions.  I am not a big fan of reading detailed accounts of actual battles within a war.  My head can’t keep from spinning when I have to assimilate all of the military names, all of the towns, all of the creeks and rivers, all of the roman numeral numbered divisions, all of the left and right flanking, etc.   If you like such things, you may like this book better than I did.  Reading such episodes for me is like watching someone chew their food for an hour; or when your friend watches a 30-minute television program yet it takes them 45 minutes to tell you about the program.  A 640-page book that only focuses on one month of a 4-year war can get awfully tedious when there is so much detail focused on the limited number of battles that were fought.

I then have to ask myself: “why did the author only write about the first month?”  I’m sure there was a reason that went over my head, but I felt this book would have been so much better had the author chronicled the entire conflict yet trimmed back on the meticulous detail.  As I said, this book is very good in places – as long as the author stays out of the weeds and, instead, lets us enjoy the view from much higher.   The most interesting parts of the book are the planning of such battles, and of the many political squabbling going on. 

One might not think of it immediately, but it becomes apparent that a big problem with a “world” war is not only having to defeat your enemy, but also having to get along with those countries that you find yourself allied with during the fighting.  We see this a lot with Britain and France.  Ah, France.  90% of this book is focused on France and Germany.  There’s a little bit of England, VERY little of Russia, and Austria’s part in this account is basically non-existent.   Anyway, back to the “allies” part: it becomes very obvious that a big reason why this war didn’t last “only a few months” as both sides predicted was because of the egos and bumbling of the major leaders such as Kaiser Wilhelm, Joseph Joffre, and John French among others.  I guess it can be slightly forgiven since this type of war had never been fought before.

The best part of this book for me were the details about the events that happened before the war.  If you know history, you know that this bloody worldwide conflict happened simply because someone from one country shot and killed a leader of another country.  So essentially, all of the different nations each lined up behind their respective ally of either of these two countries, and the rest is (incredibly unpleasant) history.  So many might be tempted to ask: “Wait…that’s it?   THAT’S what caused the first World War???”  Well, as Barbara Tuchman points out, the poison kettle had already been brewing for many years among these nations; particularly Germany and France.  In fact, the leaders of these respective countries KNOW without a doubt that a war will one day occur between them, and we therefore read about Germany’s “plans” for this fight that are concocted ten years before the actual war is even declared.

These German plans involve marching through, and essentially raping and terrorizing, neutral Belgium.  A lot of that unpleasantness is featured here as well.  Since this portion of the war really can’t be called a “battle”, it really doesn’t fall into my description earlier in this review of “long, tedious, boring, etc.”  So a definitely depressing episode, but far more interesting that the actual battles that we would read about later.  One could argue that Germany’s treatment of Belgium flavored many countries’ impression of the violent Germans.  Tuchman doesn’t hold anything back here, she’s clearly not a fan of the Kaiser and his leaders.  They’re definitely the bad guys here.  Recent historians are a bit more neutral in their assessment but one can still see how jingoistic Germany was at the time.  True, this was somewhat common in the 19^th and early 20^th centuries among the superpowers, but Germany still comes across as a very barbaric country.

One last criticism of the book is that the author seems to be a very big lover of the thesaurus.  Quite often she uses a lot of complex words in the book when simpler ones would do.  Fortunately, with an -e-reader, all one has to do is touch an unfamiliar word, and a definition immediately appears.  I found myself touching an awful lot of words while reading this.   She also includes a lot of French statements and passages without explaining to her reader just what in the heck these sayings actually mean.  Sadly, an e-reader can’t help you there.  So at times, the author comes across as being a bit of an arrogant scholar.  She also assumes the reader is already familiar with many of the people, places, and events that she mentions (we read the name ‘Rasputin’ once, but nothing about who he was and what is part was in all of this).  Perhaps this wasn’t a big deal when this book was written (sometime in the 1960s), but casual readers may want to start somewhere else if they’re not too familiar with World War I.

A good read overall, but there are a lot better accounts out there.  I would recommend G.J. Meyer’s “A World Undone” over this one – both for the novice and the well-educated.