Dear Eliot (May I?). And please call me Paul.
We have here two books that seem to bear on the same subject but which are radically, and instructively, different. Keegan’s The First World War (Knopf) is in the mode of traditional military history, and in my view traditional is a good word here, since in essence war is so depressingly traditional, involving invariably such ingredients as fear, killing, sadism, agony, guilt, and lifelong grief. On the other hand, Niall Ferguson’s The Pity of War (Basic Books) veers in so many novel directions–financial history, theories of population, inflation, taxation, and colonial politics–that a reader finally must conclude that the title is something of a sell.
Keegan first. Formerly a teacher of miliary history at Sandhurst, the British West Point, and now a writer on “defense” (formerly war) for the London Daily Telegraph, Keegan came to wide notice with his first book, The Face of Battle (1976), an appropriately gloomy canvas of soldierly actions from the 15th century to the 20th. After a masterly workout on the Battle of the Somme (20,000 killed in one day by the command mistake of having troops walk directly into machine-gun fire), Keegan finally speculates that in the nuclear age, war, in the standard sense, has now virtually “abolished itself.” And now the reader of The First World War is regaled with accounts of many other British military disasters, including Gallipoli and Passchendaele. Here, Keegan can’t help functioning as a virtual black satirist of mortal folly as well as an accomplished student of contingency and the operations of the unexpected in human affairs.
Niall Ferguson, who teaches history at Oxford, has more faith in reason and system, as well as in the benefits of sheer information. His vast book seems distinctly an outcrop, if not a symptom, of the Information Age, in that its displays of information often outweigh its manifestations of common sense and judgment. A smarty critic might, in fact, term it an “info dump,” as James Fallows recently designated Janet Malcolm’s The Crime of Sheila McGough. Pity not being a quantifiable commodity, it’s hard to see how Ferguson’s more than 40 tables full of numbers, dealing with data like “Percentage of Total Population Enfranchised for Lower Chambers” or “Major European Bond Prices, c. 1896-1914,” are really appropriate. The spirit of the business school seems to have imposed itself on what was once moral history.
One of the first jolts to the reader occurs as early as page xxvi, where Ferguson, apparently reaching for “revisionist” points, decides that the First World War was really not so bad after all and that its bad press over the years has been occasioned in part by the antiwar poetry of Wilfred Owen and such, taught in English schools, as well as the antiwar novels of the late ‘20s and the ‘30s. This movement, we are to suppose, helped give poison gas a bad name and defamed a sensible conflict into “an evil war.”
If Ferguson thinks the war makes a kind of sense, Keegan assuredly does not. “The First World War is a mystery,” he concludes, and he goes on: “Its origins are mysterious. So is its course … Why when the hope of bringing the conflict to a quick and decisive conclusion was everywhere dashed to the ground within months of its outbreak, did the combatants decide nevertheless to persist in their military effort, to mobilize for total war and eventually to commit the totality of their young manhood to mutual and existentially pointless slaughter?”
But I’m running out of space and now eagerly await the stings of the hornets I may have stirred up.
Yours,
Paul
