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4.5
If you read nothing else in this impressively written and astoundingly authoritative account of events leading up to World War I (and of the first few weeks of the war itself), do yourself the favor of at least reading the chapter titled “The Flames of Louvain” (pp. 310 – 324). Barbara Tuchman’s analysis (with many direct citations) of the world directly before and during the early days of the war has the weight of both Genesis and Ecclesiastes in its pages.To quote from my own 11/12/14 review of Bill Bryson’s NEITHER HERE NOR THERE, “(w)hy more textbooks for American high schoolers aren’t written by folks like Bill Bryson is a mystery to me, although I suspect that public school boards wouldn’t know what to do with the certain revolution in learning that might result – namely, that most kids would look at most parents and teachers and think Why can’t you think, talk and write a little more like Bill Bryson and little less like yourselves?”I’m now of a similar mind vis-à-vis Barbara W. Tuchman, as well as her unimpeachable analysis of the first world war and the events leading up to it. This is the way history should always be written and analyzed. The research and authentication of documents and personalities alone deserve some descriptor to the far right of ‘superlative,’ but these are things any scholar with enough time, money, patience and diligence can accomplish. The writing – and the few instances in which Ms. Tuchman chooses to editorialize – are monumental.I still remember being both slightly nauseated and almost bored to tears by Tolstoy’s portrayal, in WAR AND PEACE, of the Russian aristocracy in and around the period of Napoleon’s invasion. Barbara Tuchman’s non-fictional portrayal of that same aristocracy has allowed me to see the error of my ways: they apparently really were like that.As one example of Ms. Tuchman’s editorializing, I give you the following. (Keep in mind that the book was published in 1962 – well after not only WWI, but also WWII):“After graduation from the Staff College in 1898, Hoffmann had served a six-months’ tour of duty in Russia as interpreter and five years subsequently in the Russian section of the General Staff under Schlieffen before going as Germany’s military observer to the Russo-Japanese War. When a Japanese general refused him permission to watch a battle from a nearby hill, etiquette gave way to that natural quality in Germans whose expression so often fails to endear them to others. ‘You are a yellow-skin; you are uncivilized if you will not let me go to that hill!’ Hoffmann yelled at the general in the presence of other foreign attachés and at least one correspondent. Belonging to a race hardly second to the Germans in sense of self-importance, the general yelled back, ‘We Japanese are paying for this military information with our blood and we don’t propose to share it with others!’ Protocol for the occasion broke down altogether.”Tolstoy makes his own observations – equally as pithy and damning – about certain European nationalities on p. 639 (in the Pevear/Volokhonsky translation) of WAR AND PEACE. But that was fiction. And while we may find fault with either writer’s willingness to step outside of the reporting process to make a strictly human observation, it does make for an entertaining – not to say enlightening and page-turning – read!From the Website Biography.com, this quote from Barbara Tuchman herself: "The writer's object is—or should be—to hold the reader's attention … I want the reader to turn the page and keep on turning until the end. This is accomplished only when the narrative moves steadily ahead, not when it comes to a weary standstill, overloaded with every item uncovered in the research."As just a few examples of how Ms. Tuchman keeps us turning those pages, consider the three following excerpts:“In Whitehall that evening, Sir Edward Grey, standing with a friend at the window as the street lamps below were being lit, made the remark that has since epitomized the hour: ‘The lamps are going out all over Europe; we shall not see them lit again in our lifetime’” (p. 122).“At two minutes past eight that morning (August 4, 1914) the first wave of field gray broke over the Belgian frontier at Gemmerich, thirty miles from Liège. Belgian gendarmes in their sentry boxes opened fire” (p. 123). And so began the first battle of WWI – a month and a few days following the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo – as Europe entered upon “the struggle that will decide the course of history for the next hundred years” (p. 133).“The prodigal spending of lives by all the belligerents that was to mount and mount in senseless excess to hundreds of thousands at the Somme, to over a million at Verdun began on that second day of the war at Liège” (p. 174).And while the above examples suggest a privilege that could be called more ‘editorial’ (or at least ‘authorial’) than most pure historians would allow themselves, I, for one, don’t have the least objection.Needless to say, Ms. Tuchman can be as acerbic in remarks about the Allied conduct in the war as she is about the Germans – as we note from this passage on p. 220: “(i)t was explained to Lanrezac that the British Commander in Chief wished to know if he thought the Germans would cross the Meuse at Huy. ‘Tell the Marshal,’ replied Lanrezac, ‘I think the Germans have come to the Meuse to fish.’ His tone, which he might have applied to some particularly dim-witted question at one of his famous lectures, was not one customarily used toward the Field Marshal of a friendly army.”To get some sense of the early role of the U. S. in this grizzly war – and of the certain economic benefits it would reap under the tutelage of Woodrow Wilson – allow me to suggest the last paragraph of p. 335 through the top of p. 338: (“By a nice coincidence … but its natural sympathies.”)Perhaps it would be appropriate, before concluding this review, to show rather than tell something of Ms. Tuchman’s talents in description and mood-setting. And so, this excerpt at the beginning of Chapter 20, “The Front Is Paris,” on p. 373: “(t)he Grands Boulevards were empty, shop fronts were shuttered, buses, trams, cars, and horse cabs had disappeared. In their place flocks of sheep were herded across the Place de la Concorde on their way to the Gare de l’Est for shipment to the front. Unmarred by traffic, squares and vistas revealed their purity of design. Most newspapers having ceased publication, the kiosks were hung meagerly with the single-page issues of the survivors. All the tourists were gone, the Ritz was uninhabited, the Meurice a hospital. For one August in its history Paris was French—and silent. The sun shone, fountains sparked in the Rond Point, trees were green, the quiet Seine flowed by unchanging, brilliant clusters of Allied flags enhanced the pale gray beauty of the world’s most beautiful city.”And now, to the conclusion to this review, where I think it worthwhile to quote directly from Ms. Tuchman’s own Afterward – so pitch-perfect is her prose. On pp. 438 – 439, we find “…with the advent of winter, came the slow deadly sinking into the stalemate of trench warfare. Running from Switzerland to the Channel like a gangrenous wound across French and Belgian territory, the trenches determined the war of position and attrition, the brutal, mud-filled, murderous insanity known as the Western Front that was to last for four more years….Sucking up lives at a rate of 5,000 and sometimes 50,000 a day, absorbing munitions, energy, money, brains, and trained men, the Western Front ate up Allied war resources and predetermined the failure of back-door efforts like that of the Dardanelles which might otherwise have shortened the war.”To cap off this eulogy to the so-called “Great War,” we have this as a final sentence in a final footnote on that same p. 439: “(w)hen the war was over, the known dead per capita of population were 1 to 28 for France, 1 to 32 for Germany, 1 to 57 for England and 1 to 107 for Russia.”RRB02/09/15Brooklyn, NY
