between now and 2019. Already publishers eyeing the Christmas market are firing the opening shots with a bunch of books devoted to the march to war in 1914.
Max Hastings is an old trooper, a former journalist with an impressive tally of war histories to his credit. Although comfortable exploring the war's ever-lengthening historiography, he is also a master of classic narrative history, a relief given the size of this 600-page history (contained to that by largely excluding the Pacific, Africa and the Middle East).
The old journo makes himself obvious in many places, as this shot at Kaiser Wilhelm II shows: ''He had no thirst for real blood, but a taste for panoply and posturing, a craving for martial success; he displayed many of the characteristics of a uniformed version of Kenneth Grahame's Mr Toad.''
In another aside, he records that in 1914 ''Madame Tussaud's waxworks museum transferred the Kaiser from its Royal Gallery to the Chamber of Horrors.''
As the tone of these quotes suggests, Catastrophe is a pacy, entertaining, opinionated and sometimes even bitter book. Forget pen portraits of heroic geniuses: Hastings' generals ''vied with each other in misjudgements''. Austria's generals were better at waltzing than fighting. The Habsburg Empire's Conrad lost almost every battle. Germany's Moltke, a sabre-ratting tiger before the war, had a nervous collapse.
But Hastings is harshest on his fellow Britons, excoriating General Sir John French for being almost as much trouble to his French allies as the Germans.
''The only Band of Brothers to which Britain's generals might be likened was that of Cain and Abel.''
Grand strategies fell apart as reality hit home. Germany's Schlieffen Plan, its gamble for quickly defeating France before moving on to tackle Russia, perished within weeks as its advance crawled to a halt. The country's ill-conceived naval race with Britain fared no better as the Royal Navy took advantage of geography and greater firepower to pen up the High Seas Fleet.
So who was most to blame? Hastings assigns the biggest share to Germany for giving its unsteady Austrian ally that infamous ''blank cheque''.
While I suspect we will go on arguing for years to come (and about his belief that Britain could not have stepped aside in 1914), we will not disagree the war was a catastrophe for ordinary people. Hastings never forgets those caught up in unprecedented events, the Serbian civilians butchered by Austrian soldiers, the British, Belgian and German troops hunkered down in trenches, dying by the thousands, often from otherwise non-fatal wounds infected by the Western Front's heavily-manured soils and the seasick sailors patrolling the frozen North Sea.
The book ends at Christmas 1914 with millions of men shivering along nearly static battlefields. Even if many leaders had lost hope of a quick victory, how many in Europe's front lines and factories could guess another four years of catastrophe lay ahead?
- Gavin McLean is a Wellington historian.
