The First World War: A New History

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This teaches us an important lesson: Modern wars are not about strategy, technology or leadership anymore. It is about how long a country manages to keep its people in illusion. The longer they can, the better their shot at winning. 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. Image: Robert Graves' Good-bye to All That is a seminal autobiographical work detailing the author's frontline experiences.

Sassoon’s own semi-autobiographical novel Memoirs of an Infantry Officer brings to life the writer’s journey from soldier to anti-war pioneer. Technology: Keegan does slip a bit at times and tries to show the influence of communication technology (esp radio) and military technology (esp tanks) but again, hedges it by showing us how contingent that too is. The British were ahead of the Germans in tank-tech, but it was purely fortuitous. Neither were using radio tech on the ground. Again, this was not rally a technological limitation. Consider how within two years radio was everywhere, so were tanks.

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There are some people who are. There’s Rupert Brooke, ‘To turn, as swimmers into cleanness leaping, / Glad from a world grown old and cold and weary’: we’ve been living in this murky, unsure world we don’t really understand—in the Edwardian period there was a lot of social conflict—and suddenly the war makes everything simple and clear. We know who’s on our side. We know who we’re against and we know what to do. We’ve got a job to do that doesn’t involve us having to find a job. So there’s some of that. The First World War by John Keegan is an excellent one-volume treatment of the Great War. I read this book because I felt my knowledge of World War I left much to be desired. I wanted to get a good understanding of the entire conflict before diving in to more specific battles, campaigns, and other events. That's exactly what this book offered. All Quiet on the Western Front has been adapted for the screen three times. The 1930s version won the Academy Award for Best Picture, but the 2022 Netflix production is the only one to be shot in German. Regeneration, Pat Barker Author Erich Maria Remarque had served with the Imperial German Army during World War One. He drew on his experiences in the trenches to bring the reality of the war to vivid life. A good biography can really help you understand the personalities involved in prosecuting the Great War. As such, some of the best books on WW1 are biographies of its main actors.

Author Robert Graves, possibly most famous for his Imperial Rome-set novel I, Claudius, was one such soldier. There will probably never be a singular best book to read covering the Great War. It’s simply too big a subject but it remains an interesting, beguiling, and enthralling topic for readers and writers alike. What is the best way to learn about WW1?

The two armies had very different ways of going about it. The Germans were much more programmatic and centralized in the way that they tried to do it. Their self-image was that they were very good at learning. I don’t think they were. I think they were too programmatic. They were very good at uniformity and systemization, but that made them a bit predictable, which can be a problem. These tended to be reversed almost immediately. Any ‘turning points’ were just the winds of war, of morale - just as in The Iliad when war seems to turn at the urging of the gods giving morale to the men. What seemed decisive at the moment soon turned out to be just another exercise in stalemate. Nothing on the field seemed to decide how this stalemate could be broken. The really major shifts in fortune were usually due to events far from the battle-filed.

What I was saying earlier about Vera Brittain wanting people to learn from her experiences—something you see again and again in these newspapers is: some 19-year-old gets killed, and in his obituary, his friend or his brother is like, ‘no one will ever forget his death.’ I found that so upsetting. I mean, of course, you can’t remember everyone who died in a war for all eternity, but there was something so tragic to me about how forgotten those newspapers were, when they must have been so important when they were written. 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.In the foreword, Remarque writes: “This book is to be neither an accusation nor a confession, and least of all an adventure, for death is not an adventure to those who stand face to face with it. It will try simply to tell of a generation of men who, even though they may have escaped (its) shells, were destroyed by the war." But it’s also partly because of who wrote it. Sir Michael Howard is a very fine historian by any measure, but certainly the greatest living military historian or historian of warfare. He’s someone who has fought—he won a medal in the Second World War; he’s thought about war all his life. He’s brought all of that thinking and experience and writing and advising policymakers and all sorts of other things and put it all into this one tiny little book about the First World War. So it’s incredibly rich and wise and balanced in the views that it takes. And because it also reflects all the research that was excellent when he wrote it, it’s the very best way for a beginner to get into the First World War.