All Things Military

The publication of The Summer the Archduke Died demonstrates that, even while in nominal retirement, Louis D. Rubin, Jr., remains one of our most gifted literary analysts, his uncommon critical judgment working smoothly and surely at peak penetration. As a university distinguished professor of English, emeritus, at the University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill and as cofounder of Algonquin Books, Rubin has spent a productive lifetime earning his sterling reputation as an editor, teacher, novelist, essayist, and all-around literary and historical scholar. The Summer the Archduke Died adds to and enhances that reputation by bringing together nine of his essays—some of them previously published, all of them carefully reworked for this volume—in which he studies a host of topics ranging from war and literature to the men and women whose careers have been so closely associated with both. In addition to the pleasure that one derives from watching a fine mind operate, the reader comes away from each essay knowing that he has been offered a new insight into a complex subject and that Rubin has delivered these insights with a compelling style.

"A Certain Day in 1939," Rubin's opening essay, functions as a prelude to his book and explains how he first developed his interest in military history. When World War ii began, the fifteen-year-old Louis Rubin jumped on his bicycle and rode straight down to Charleston harbor, half-anticipating that a German merchant vessel might seek refuge from British warships inside American territorial waters, something which had occurred at the commencement of the First World War. After hours of waiting and watching for a development that was not to be repeated, the young Louis rode home disappointed but retained an undiminished interest in all things military, and with time that interest evolved into his lifelong study of military history.

In "The Summer the Archduke Died," the volume's eponymous second essay, Rubin presents a compelling examination of how the great powers virtually blundered into the First World War. At various points, Rubin argues, firmer leadership might have reversed the dangerous courses that nations were taking and, in the process, saved at least ten million lives. "What happened to Germany, and plunged Europe and the world into war, was a catastrophic failure of statecraft, a collapse of leadership." World War ii, he suggests, was simply a continuation of the First World War with five times the number of deaths; but, when that war began, no one blundered into anything: nations went to war deliberately, knowing full well what they were getting into and knowing that the war had to be fought.

"The Weasel's Twist, the Weasel's Tooth: The First World War as Military History" offers a clear appreciation about why the history of the First World War has been so overshadowed by the history of the Second World War. In the first place, and aside from personal narratives and works of fiction about the war, good military history requires time to develop: documents must emerge, facts must be uncovered, and historians must have time to reflect and develop perspective. With regard to the First World War, by the time historians were prepared and ready to write it, the Second World War was already in progress, and nearly everyone's attention had been diverted. Furthermore a nagging rhetorical problem also threw up a difficult barrier: to the First World War, one found "no real conclusion other than a chronological one, and to that extent it was deficient in dramatic resolution—a beginning, a middle, but no end." As a result only in the most recent decades have we begun to examine World War i with the thorough attention that it deserves. When last I looked, for example, the official history covering what might have been volume 2 to Military Operations in East Africa, dealing with the period from October 1916 through the end of the war, was still unpublished—the manuscript languishing in the vaults of the Imperial War Museum...