Casus Belli

War is a good subject for students of human nature. You might even write a book about it. Barbara Tuchman did, calling it August 1914. An encyclopaedic account of the opening month of the First World War, it was published in 1962 and sold over a million copies. It won the Pulitzer Prize. It was written by a woman. There had never been anything quite like it.

August 1914 was timely. Of the sixty-odd years of the twentieth century, ten had already been consumed by world war, many if not most of the rest spent either in anticipation of conflict or in coping with its aftermath. Scarcely had the detonation of atomic bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki signalled the end of the Second World War than the Cold War declared itself. In the autumn after the spring publication of August 1914 came the Cuban Missile Crisis. President Kennedy made the book compulsory reading for his advisers. There was a great deal of quite practical interest in how wars begin. A few years ago it was a concern I very much shared – not because I wanted to start a war myself, but rather because I had been asked to write a book about the Kaiser’s little local difficulty. There are of course bibliographies of the literature of the war – quite large ones – and digital catalogues. August 1914 attracted my interest because its popularity meant it was readily available on the library’s open shelves. Tuchman, I discovered, brought particular gifts to her desk. Born in New York in 1912, she was the daughter of a wealthy banker, Maurice Wertheim, and granddaughter of Woodrow Wilson’s ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, Henry Morgenthau. She graduated from Radcliffe College, the women’s counterpart of Harvard, in 1933. With a degree in history and literature, she worked as a research assistant in Japan and China, as a journalist covering the Spanish Civil War, and in a similar capacity for the US Office of War Information from 1942 to 1945. In 1943 she married. She was highly intelligent, well connected, for the time exceptionally well travelled, and sufficiently wealthy to be able to sidestep the toils of the close and the quad. Not a historian’s historian, she favoured a journalistic and literary approach to history. She wanted the reader to turn the pages to the end, and attributed her success to the fact that she was not in academia: ‘It would have stifled my writing capacity.’ By the time she sat down to write August 1914, she had already written two books on British foreign policy and one on the Zimmerman telegram, the forgery that brought America into the First World War. She was 45. It was time to write her chef d’oeuvre. If her earlier books were tributaries, August 1914 is one of the great gushing rivers of history. Tuchman believed the First World War had spawned the Second, and the Second had spawned the Cold War. It was the fount of all the evil that defined the twentieth century, and of the catastrophes visited on those who lived through those times. In fact it was more than this. The cataclysm put an end to the notion of beneficent human progress, an idea which had seemed quite plausible in the second half of the nineteenth century. As Tuchman wrote, quoting D. H. Lawrence, the consequence of the war was simple: ‘All the great words were cancelled out.’ The First World War lasted for fifty-one months, but it was the first month that was by far and away the most important, for it defined the course of the war. As Tuchman herself says, the battle in which the opening phase of the war culminated – that of the Marne – was ‘one of the decisive battles of the world’. From that all else stemmed. Her opening page is a dazzling overture in which she prefigures the collapse of the dynasties of Russia, Germany, Austria and the Ottoman Empire which the war would precipitate.

So gorgeous was the spectacle on the May morning of 1910 when nine kings rode in the funeral of Edward VII of England that the crowd, waiting in hushed and black-clad awe, could not keep back gasps of admiration. In scarlet and blue and green and purple, three by three the sovereigns rode through the palace gates, with plumed helmets, gold braid, crimson sashes and jewelled orders flashing in the sun. After them came five heirs apparent, forty more imperial or royal highnesses, seven queens – four dowager and three regnant – and a scattering of special ambassadors from uncrowned countries. Together they represented seventy nations in the greatest assemblage of royalty and rank ever gathered in one place and, of its kind, the last. The muffled tongue of Big Ben tolled nine by the clock as the cortège left the palace, but on history’s clock it was sunset and the sun of the old world was setting in a dying blaze of splendour never to be seen again.

Having set the scene, she then takes the most generous and expansive of approaches to her subject. ‘No other episode in history’, Tuchman declares, ‘has been more fully documented by its participants.’ This, and the time she has at her disposal, enable her to revel in her sources, to delve with extraordinary energy, industry and imagination into the minutiae of that month of August 1914. She goes on location, touring the battlefields of Europe in a hired Renault. She makes notes on cards that will fit in her purse. She then lets herself go over more than six hundred pages, the biggest of canvases for the shortest of periods. The result is exhaustive yet not exhausting history, chapter and verse, seasoned with the most telling detail. She spreads herself like a Macaulay or a Gibbon. In the opening chapters she illustrates and analyses the sores festering in Germany and across Europe that led to the tumble in headlong succession of the diplomatic dominoes; and she discusses whether anything could have been done to avoid the unfolding cataclysm. This is the story of the assassination in Sarajevo of the heir to the Austro-Hungarian Empire, of the Emperor Franz Joseph’s ultimatum to Serbia, and of the inevitable consequences of the treaties binding the Triple Alliance of Germany, Austria-Hungary and Italy, and the Triple Entente of Great Britain, France and Russia. Great Britain havers over its commitment to the neutrality of Belgium, violated by Kaiser Wilhelm’s execution of the Schlieffen Plan – the invasion of France through the Netherlands and Belgium. On 4 August it finally declares war. ‘The lamps’, said the British Foreign Secretary Edward Grey so memorably, ‘are going out all over Europe. We shall not see them lit again in our lifetime.’ For Tuchman, with diplomacy faltering, it is the naval chase through the Mediterranean of Germany’s two cruisers, the Goeben and the Breslau, that is the hinge of fate. This is as exciting in her pages as any chase in C. S. Forester or Patrick O’Brian. The British and French fleets might – probably should – have sunk the two ships, but only the smaller HMS Gloucester succeeded in engaging them before the Kaiser’s cruisers outgunned her and reached the Dardanelles. Here they successfully bullied the Ottoman regime into allowing them safe passage to the Black Sea. So Russia was cut off from the Mediterranean and her western allies; the Ottoman Empire threw in its lot with the Central Powers; and in due course there followed the calamity of Gallipoli. Tuchman claims, ‘No other single exploit of the war cast so long a shadow.’ Then she slips in this:

There arrived at Constantinople the small Italian passenger steamer which had witnessed the Gloucester’s action . . . Among its passengers were the . . . three grandchildren of the American Ambassador [to the Ottoman Empire, Henry Morgenthau]. They brought an exciting tale of the boom of guns, puffs of white smoke, and the twisting and manoeuvring of faraway ships.

Years later, she acknowledged herself to have been one of those grandchildren. The land battles follow, starting with the right hook of General Alexander von Kluck’s First Army into Belgium. ‘Let the last man on the right brush the Channel with his sleeve,’ he declared. The Germans believed that the Belgians would, could, no more resist invasion than ‘dreaming sheep’. They were wrong. Fight the Belgians did, though outnumbered six to one, their machine guns ‘like the milk-carts of Flanders pulled by dogs’, against wave on wave of field-grey infantry and artillery. The Belgians suffered dreadfully – there were summary executions and sackings; and at the end of August the invaders vengefully burned down the medieval city and university of Louvain and its incomparable library founded in 1426 ‘when Berlin was a clump of wooden huts’. At the 1910 funeral with which she opens her epic, Tuchman had written, ‘Few observers had eyes for the ninth king, the only one among them who was to achieve greatness as a man.’ That was Albert of Belgium. Tuchman’s cumulative analysis of quite why this all happened is witty, sobering and persuasive. If the Kaiser was the belligerent in invading Belgium en route to France, the course of August showed that he had unleashed a chain of events entirely beyond his control; or indeed that of the British Prime Minister Henry Asquith, Edward Grey and Lord Kitchener in London, Prime Minister Jean Viviani in Paris, or Tsar Nicholas in Russia. King Albert aside, the only player manifesting any vision was Kitchener – ‘from fathomless oracular depths, his lone voice predicted that the war would last not a month but years’. The rest were almost entirely unsuited to the roles in which history had cast them. Tsar Nicholas was a fool, Winston Churchill was a warmonger, Asquith was indolent, thoughtless, given to drink, Kitchener’s Russian counterpart Vladimir Sukhomlinov was work-shy and incapable of distinguishing truth from falsehood, and the Kaiser was vain, overmastered by jealousy of England. When Russia and Great Britain declared war, he remarked, ‘If my grandmother [Queen Victoria] had been alive, she would never have allowed it.’ As to the institutions by which the age set such store, the French parliament may stand for all in its outrage that the French infantry, the poilus, should fight in a uniform less eye-catching to the Kaiser’s snipers and machine-gunners than red: ‘Le pantalon rouge, c’est la France.’ It was not surprising that Kennedy caused August 1914 to be required reading. It may have saved us from Armageddon. More than sixty years have passed since August 1914 was first published. History books date as scholarship moves on. A minority continue to be read. August 1914 may now best be enjoyed for the drama of the hours and days leading to Britain’s declaration of war at midnight on 4 August 1914, and for Tuchman’s wry portraiture of the participants and their nations. In this and her other works she proved herself not only a masterly popular historian but also one ahead of her time, breaking into what was traditionally a male world. ‘If a man is a writer, everybody tiptoes around past the locked door of the breadwinner. But if you’re an ordinary female housewife, people say . . . it’s not professional.’ Barbara Tuchman blazed quite a trail.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 83 © Jim Ring 2024