The Pity of War (review)

The Pity of War: Explaining World War I. By Nail Ferguson (New York, Basic Books, 1999) 563 pp. $30.00

One would like to condemn The Pity of War, but that would not be fair; one would like to praise it, but standards cannot be forgotten. Its weaknesses outweigh its strengths. The great problem is its thesis: Germany started World War I but Britain caused it; English intervention alone made war disaster; and everyone would have gained had Germany won quickly and cheaply. This argument rests on an account of diplomacy that varies between incompetent and perverse. Like Alan J. P. Taylor, The Origins of the Second World War (London, 1961), Ferguson treats German policy solely as a condition for, and not a cause of, events. The Germans acted because others made them do so; since they did not motivate their own actions, whatever they did was unavoidable, thus irrelevant for analytical purposes. He overloads causal responsibility on Britain. He minimizes all evidence of German prewar hostility to Britain, because it reflected just a sense of impotence. He treats Germany's preparations for war as irrelevant because they failed. He reads Lord Grey's foreign policy as did the less measured school of German authors between 1914 and 1945, and he has mastered neither the literature nor the archives on prewar diplomacy.

Ferguson also misunderstands the nature of the prewar Triple Entente and of Edward Grey's policy, which was to use the balance of power to support the status quo and avoid European war. He ignores Grey's anti-Russian and pro-German tendencies after 1911. His arguments about diplomacy tend toward the incoherent: "If Germany had not violated Belgian neutrality in 1914, Britain would have" (67). This nonsense starts from Ferguson's ignorance of the laws of neutrality and blockade. He reports that in 1912, when considering a possible war with Germany, Whitehall intended to prevent Belgium from passing contraband to Germany, a step it thought proper under international law. Perhaps this reading was wrong, but it has some validity. Does blockade equal invasion? Then Ferguson indicates that Britain fought in 1914 only because Germany violated Belgian neutrality, which contradicts his original statement!

Similar problems wreck his argument about "the Kaiser's European Union"--that if Britain had stayed neutral in 1914, Germany would have won the war easily, and everyone would have benefited. What does he think Germany would have done as master of Europe (especially since Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz's program was intended to let Germany start a naval war against Britain between 1915 and 1920)? What could British statesmen have expected them to produce? Arguably, had Britain not intervened, Germany would have mastered Europe, renewed naval construction, formed an alliance with Russia, and started a new world war against Britain.

In this case, as well as others, Ferguson's attempts to illuminate the past through counterfactuals fail, because he does not understand how to use them. His suggestion, for example, that in 1918 General Erich Ludendorff would have been wise either to negotiate peace by offering to restore French and Belgian territories after the first victories of March, or to hold on grimly after the defeats of July and August, because his men would have fought hard once they realized the scale of their enemy's demands, are impossible. On the former option, Ludendorff could not have adopted so supple a strategy, especially when military victory seemed in his grasp, and on the latter, his army had broken and could not be restored.

These failings are fundamental, but half of the book is worth reading, particularly the comparative examination of economic and military power. Ferguson holds that the Allies were wealthier than their foes, but failed to make effective use of their advantage (spending three times as much to kill one soldier as their enemies) because the Germans were better soldiers. This is a provocative but problematical argument. It overstates the importance of economics to victory...