Catastrophe 1914

The detail Hastings returns to, again and again, is that the great armies of 1914 could not be switched on gradually. Mobilization meant moving millions of men and their equipment by rail to the frontiers, and the plans for doing so had been refined for decades into rigid sequences that, once begun, were almost impossible to reverse or modify. To mobilize was, in practice, to commit. The trains became a kind of fate.

Germany's was the most fateful of all. The Schlieffen plan, as the army had developed it, assumed a two-front war and demanded that France be knocked out fast, before Russia's slower mobilization could bring its weight to bear. The route to a quick French defeat ran through Belgium. So Germany's military timetable required the violation of a neutral country's borders — a decision that all but guaranteed British entry, and that the soldiers treated as a settled technical necessity rather than a political choice.

The popular image of the First World War is mud, barbed wire, and stalemate. Hastings insists that 1914 was nothing of the kind. The opening campaign was a war of rapid movement, of armies marching enormous distances in summer heat, of cavalry and open-field battles fought at a tempo the later years never matched. It was also, in proportion to its length, staggeringly lethal.

The German armies swept through Belgium and into France, where French commanders, wedded to a doctrine of all-out attack, hurled their men in red trousers and blue coats against modern rifles and artillery. The Battle of the Frontiers in August produced French casualties on a scale almost beyond belief — roughly a quarter of a million in a few weeks, with a single day in late August costing tens of thousands of lives. Élan, the French faith in offensive spirit, met machine guns and lost.

Step back from the battles and a larger point in Hastings's account comes into focus. The catastrophe of 1914 was not the work of monsters, and it was not pure accident either. It was made by men of ordinary competence and ordinary vanity, operating inside systems — alliances, mobilization plans, doctrines of national honour — that were larger and less governable than their own judgment. The tragedy is precisely that so few of them were extraordinary. Modest men, faced with a crisis that demanded greatness, reached for the procedures they knew.

Hastings is impatient with the fashionable view that, because everyone shared in the drift, no one can be held responsible. Shared responsibility is not the same as equal responsibility. He returns the weight to Berlin and Vienna, who chose to gamble on a localized war and accepted a general one. That moral judgment, delivered without melodrama, is what distinguishes his book from the soothing story of blameless sleepwalkers. Choices were made, by identifiable people, and they could have been made differently.

The men who marched off in August 1914 belonged to a world that the year itself destroyed. They expected to be home by autumn; instead they opened a war that ran for more than four years and ended the European order they had been defending. Hastings closes the loop on his own opening image: the Sarajevo killing, which had seemed at first like one more Balkan tremor, turned out to be the hinge on which the century swung. By December, with the armies dug in from the Channel to Switzerland, the catastrophe was no longer a crisis to be managed but a condition to be endured.