"(...) Last year, Cambridge published a collection of 500-plus pages on one of the most exhaustively examined subjects in the whole history of historical writing, the origins of the First World War. As for general works, in the past few years at least six have appeared in English, by both academic and popular historians. The Western Front: Battle Ground and Home Front in the First World War (New York: Palgrave, Macmillan, 2003) by Hunt Tooley, who teaches at Austin College, in Texas, falls into the academic category, and for such a short volume (305 pages) it offers a very great deal indeed.
Tooley traces the roots of the world-historical catastrophe of 1914–1918 to the Franco-Prussian war, which, while achieving German unification in 1871, understandably fostered an enduring resentment in France, "a country that was accustomed to humiliating others during 400 years of warmaking and aggression" (p. 5). Bismarck sought to ensure the Second Reich’s security through defensive treaties with the remaining continental powers (the ones with Austria-Hungary and Italy constituted the Triple Alliance). But under the new (and last) Kaiser, Wilhelm II, the treaty with Russia was permitted to lapse, freeing Russia to ally with France. The over-ambitious Wilhelm’s extensive naval program was perceived by the British as a mortal threat; starting in 1904 they developed an Entente cordiale (cordial understanding) with France, enlarged in 1907 to include Russia. Now the Germans had good reason to fear a massive Einkreisung (encirclement).
A series of diplomatic crises increased tensions, aggravated by the two Balkan wars of 1912–1913, from which a strong Serbia emerged, evidently aiming at the disintegration of the Habsburg monarchy. With Russia acting as Serbia’s mentor and growing in power every year, military men in Vienna and Berlin reflected that if the great conflict was destined to come, then better sooner than later.
(...) Archduke Franz Ferdinand’s assassination in Sarajevo by a Bosnian Serb set "the stone rolling down the hill," as the German chancellor bleakly put it. Mobilizations and ultimatums followed, and a few days later the giant conscript armies of the continental powers were in motion. In democratic Britain, the commitment to France had been hidden from the public, from Parliament, and even from most of the cabinet.
The German declaration of war on Russia and France placed the Asquith government in a grave quandary, but, as Tooley writes, "the first German footfall in Belgium salvaged the situation" (p. 39). Now Foreign Secretary Edward Grey could deceitfully claim that England was joining its entente partners simply to defend Belgian neutrality.
(...)The war was greeted as a cleansing, purifying moment, at least by the urban masses, whose enthusiasm easily outweighed the rural population’s relative passivity. (...)Especially ecstatic were the intellectuals, who viewed the war as a triumph of "idealism" over the selfish individualism and crass materialism of "the trading and shopkeeping spirit" (...)Socialist parties, except in Russia and later Italy, added their eager support, as did even celebrated anarchists like Benjamin Tucker and Peter Kropotkin.
(...)The German strategy in the event of war on two fronts, the famous Schlieffen plan, foolishly assumed the infallibility of its execution and ignored the factors that doomed it: active Belgian resistance, the rapid Russian mobilization, and the landing of a British Expeditionary Force (those mercenaries who, as another poet, A. E. Housman, wrote, "saved the sum of things for pay").(...) In 1916 "the butcher’s bill," as Robert Graves called it, came due, at Verdun and at the Somme. Ill-educated neoconservatives who in 2002–2003 derided France as a nation of cowards seem never to have heard of Verdun, where a half million French casualties were the price of keeping the Germans at bay. On the first day of the battle of the Somme, the brainchild of Field Marshal Haig, the British lost more men than on any other single day in the history of the Empire, more than in acquiring Canada and India combined.
(...) In Britain, France, and later the United States, proponents of centralization and planning gleefully exploited the occasion to extend state activism into every corner of the economy. (...). The deluded patriots who purchased government war bonds were crippled by inflation, now "introduced [to] the twentieth century…as a way of life" (p. 113). Tooley cites Murray Rothbard on one of the hidden detriments of the war: it initiated the inflationary business cycle that ended in the Great Depression.
(...) The aggrandizement of state power in the combatant nations reached, Tooley notes, a kind of reductio ad absurdum in what was probably the war’s worst result: the establishment of a terrorist totalitarian regime by the Bolsheviks in Russia.
American entry had been virtually determined in the wake of the sinking of the Lusitania, when the terminally Anglophiliac Wilson administration declared that the Germans would be held "strictly accountable" for the loss of any Americans’ lives through U-boat action, even when those Americans were traveling on armed British merchant ships that carried munitions of war.
(...) British propaganda was, as always, topnotch. Its high point was the mendacious Bryce report on the "Belgian atrocities."
(...) The Bolshevik coup d’état of November, 1917 led to an armistice in the East, and the Germans launched their final, va-banque push on the western front.(...) By the summer, the American expeditionary force under John G. Pershing amounted to 2 million men, many of them keen to make the whole world safe for democracy.
(...) century earlier, after the Napoleonic wars, the aristocrats at the Congress of Vienna fashioned a viable system that avoided general war for another hundred years. At Paris in 1919, the diplomats, now answerable to their democratic constituencies, set the stage for a virtually inevitable future conflict. Tooley very correctly places the word "peace," as in the Versailles "peace" treaty, in ironic quotes.
(...) In U. S. history it has been crises, most often wars, that result in a great expansion of state power. Once the crisis is over, the state and its budgets, deficits, functionaries, and regulations are cut back to more normal levels, but never to what they were before, and they go on from there. Ideology, the underlying political mentality of the people, is also permanently skewed in a state-receptive direction. As Tooley sums up: "If the twentieth century became the century of managerial control, of the prioritizing of group goals and group efficiency over the autonomies of individuals, families, and regions, then we will find in World War I the accelerator of processes which were emerging before then" (p. 267)." The Great War Retold by Ralph Raico
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