Catastrophe 1914: Europe Goes to War

 

Catastrophe 1914: Europe Goes to War – Max Hastings

A bit of a strange one. Good, but strange.  The first world war (now infamously known as World War I) was fought from 1914-1918.  This book details the first year of the conflict and the first year only. In a sense this is good since the book is quite lengthy, and had the author detailed all four years, it would have been far too tedious for my tastes. A strength about writing about the first year is that, like any major conflict, the events that lead up to the actual fighting are just as important as the conflict itself, and in many ways more interesting.

This is in fact a major strength of this book.  There’s an awful lot of rich, yet unpleasant, detail describing the tinderbox of Western Europe during the first couple of decades of the twentieth century.  When the Archduke Franz Ferdinand is assassinated by Serbian terrorists, it’s unfortunate with what follows yet not surprising.  In fact, this is probably the best book I’ve ever read that describes the ‘why’.

The problem with this book, for me anyway, is once the war starts.  Too much of this book describes the intricate details of the many battles and many high-ranking personalities in the conflict.  This, as I’ve detailed in countless other reviews, simply doesn’t interest me.  I’ve always maintained that ‘action’ is engaging to watch, but reading about it rarely delivers its intended effect.  As tragic as the first world war was, there simply wasn’t a lot of variety to make reading about it interesting.  For much of the conflict, it was an uncomfortable stalemate, the soldiers dug trenches, suffered through rats and mud, and rarely made any geographical progress.  So all of the major battles of the first year are detailed here, and they simply are too detailed and largely uneventful to be of much interest.

The biggest strength, however, is when the author focuses on the mindset of the soldiers, the global community, the families back home, and the general feelings of the consensus of everyone involved.  He peppers this volume with personal anecdotes from many of the ‘common’ people who lived during the conflict.  It puts a human, yet tragic, spin on the overall picture.

Most of the engaging parts of this book didn’t necessarily need to be limited to the year 1914.  The horrors described by the various personalities aren’t necessarily ‘battle’ specific, so my guess is the people back home felt the same way in 1914 as they did in, say, 1916.  Yet placing such events at the beginning of the timeline does make the most sense.

Which leads me to conclude that this book would have been better had the author trimmed down the many details of the fighting and focus more on what makes this book the most interesting. I think the major battles of the first year definitely should have been included, yet if he shaved each of those chapters in half, it would have made far better reading.

Yes, this was good, but if you happen to glance through the chapters of the battles (as I ended up unintentionally doing), you won’t miss that much.  Max Hastings is a great author when writing about major conflicts, and this one ranks with his best.  Sure, it could have been better, but none that I’ve come across describe the ‘why’ better than he does.