The Guns of August

Synopsis
An insightful account of the escalating tensions in Europe that led to the outbreak of World War I and the first fateful campaigns in the conflict.

My thoughts
Barbara Tuchman is in a class of her own. A history of the diplomatic failures that led to World War I could get bogged down in grim details and cumbersome trivialities, but Tuchman deftly navigates through the mess in less than 100 pages and then goes on to describe the battles leading up to the Marne. Her writing style is unparalleled, and she has a gift for weeding through the banalities of history and focusing on a few gems to tell a story. Tuchman obviously did a painstaking amount of research - combing through memoirs, diaries, newspapers, official reports, and other contemporary accounts - and she managed to whittle everything down into an engrossing history. This book is compulsively readable, but it's also about a very serious subject.

I never realized the extent of the sheer incompetence on all sides of the war. Europe's leading military minds considered war inevitable and they spent decades preparing for the conflict, yet when it came they were all unprepared and hampered by inflexibility. The Germans had a strict timeline and their insistence on sticking to it left them unable to improvise when unforeseen events arose. Personality conflicts between the French and British officers went so deep that they seriously undermined the war effort. Most tragic were the Russians. Tuchman is in her element describing their state of (un)preparedness:

Insofar as readiness for war was concerned, the regime was personified by its Minister for War, General Sukhomlinov, an artful, indolent, pleasure-loving, chubby little man in his sixties of whom his colleague, Foreign Minister Sazonov, said, "It was very difficult to make him work but to get him to tell the truth was well-nigh impossible." ... In 1913 he dismissed five instructors of the [Staff] College who persisted in preaching the vicious heresy of "fire tactics."

That's right, the Russian War Ministry was led by a man who didn't recognize the power of guns and cannons over bayonets.

One of the most chilling accounts in the book discusses the German Army's use of terrorism to cow the citizens of Belgium. The Germans cut through Belgium to get through France; they didn't want to do it, but it was the quickest way to get to France and then the Belgians had the gall to resist, which messed up their unforgiving timeline. In an effort to get the Belgians to behave, the Germans began trying various forms of terrorism, including burning cities and executing hostages. This did not have the intended effect; in fact, it inspired even more resistance. It's hardly the first time an invading army has resorted to terrorism, but it struck me as especially disturbing.

Bottom line
Read it, even if you have no interest in or knowledge of World War I.

Fine print
The Guns of August, by Barbara Tuchman
Genre: history
Photo from Goodreads
I borrowed this book from the library