Cataclysm: The First World War as Political Tragedy (review)

David Stevenson has written the most detailed, comprehensive one-volume history of the First World War's origins, conduct, and aftermath now available. Exploiting both his earlier work and that of other scholars, he describes the complexity of the war from governmental offices and the home front to trench warfare and the struggle's global dimension. He uses the comparative approach of his previous works to show how governments reacted differently to similar problems. This analytical framework confers exceptional depth and relevance, whether the issue is tactics, the role of women during and after the war, or the ability of the financial systems to sustain the staggering effort.

A short review can only note a few of his most important points. To start, he argues that Germany and Austria-Hungary took decisions, after Sarajevo, that caused the war, but he firmly rejects any idea of a premeditated war. Berlin and Vienna, fearful that the strategic equilibrium was shifting against them, risked a local war in a gamble that allowed the Russians and the French to call their bluff.

Stevenson traces the ensuing war's escalation, then stalemate, and then escalation again, the near exhaustion of 1917, and finally victory in 1918. He first describes a military or political situation, and then succinctly explains why an outcome occurred. In his analysis, for instance, of 1915-16 he outlines the widening of the war as Italy, Bulgaria, and Rumania joined, discusses the emerging intransigence about war aims, explains why the land war stalled, and recounts how the governments sought to pay for the tragedy. At each stage he wants to know how the governments managed, despite their own errors, to retain popular support (Russia excepted) and to sustain troop morale. Patriotism, censorship, coercion, and the sheer fact that each power still thought it could win are among his explanations for this endurance.

Repeatedly he returns to the chances for a negotiated end to the fighting, always problematic once the Germans had secured their position in Belgium and France. The Triple Entente wanted to expel the invaders, the Germans and Austro-Hungarians to retain their gains. Given the sheer magnitude of casualties from the opening moments of the war, a peace that did not honor the human sacrifices became unthinkable. Thus the struggle continued.

Stevenson, as Hew Strachan and John Morrow have recently done, reminds readers both of the war's global dimension and of the part that imperialism played in the considerations of the warring states. For the British this aspect, however concealed, became almost as crucial as supporting France on the western front.

From the start, the Triple Entente had the long-term edge, a point the German leadership recognized early and more urgently as the war continued. This brought their desperate decision to launch all-out submarine warfare, a move that eventually brought waves of American soldiers that permanently shifted the balance. If Stevenson is sparse in his comments about the American military contribution, he applauds President Woodrow Wilson's conversion of the German request for an armistice into a de facto surrender.

In his discussions of the actual fighting, the author displays a singular ability to show the big picture, then gives enough precise detail to make it understandable, while never leaving the reader in the forest looking at the bark. The ongoing evolution of tactics and technology receive his frequent attention, as does the role of intelligence.

Unlike most accounts of the war, Stevenson takes the story to 1939, asking why the peace failed. Put simply, it collapsed because the winners did not enforce the peace. As in July 1914, so again in the years from 1936 to 1939: individual leaders, not anonymous states, made, or did not make, decisions that doomed the peace.

Some readers will wish for more pictures, maps placed alongside the text, and shorter paragraphs. But these are quibbles. This is a splendid account of the war, one that...