- Tuchman, Barbara W.
The Guns of August.
New York: Presidio Press, [1962, 1988] 2004.
ISBN 978-0-345-47609-8.
-
In 1871
Helmuth
von Moltke the Elder, chief of the Prussian General Staff
and architect of modern German military strategy, wrote
“no plan of operations extends with any
certainty beyond the first contact with the main
hostile force”, an observation which is often
paraphrased as “No plan survives contact with
the enemy”. This is doubtless the case, but as this
classic history of the diplomatic run-up to World War I
and the initial hostilities from the outbreak of the war
through the
First
Battle of the Marne demonstrates, plans, treaties, and military and
political structures put into place long before open conflict
erupts can tie the hands of decision makers long after events
have proven them obsolete.
I first read this book in the 1980s, and I found upon rereading it
now with the benefit of having since read a number of other
accounts of the period, both
contemporary
and
historical,
that I'd missed or failed to fully appreciate
some important points on the first traverse.
The first is how
crunchy
and rigid the system of alliances among the Great Powers was
in the years before the War, and also the plans of mobilisation of
the land powers: France, Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Russia.
Viewed from a prewar perspective many thought these arrangements
were guarantors of security: creating a balance of power in which
the ultimate harm to any aggressor was easily calculated to be
far greater than any potential gain, especially as their economies
became increasingly interlinked and dependent upon international
trade. For economic reasons alone, any war was expected to be
short—no power was believed to have the resources to sustain
a protracted conflict once its trade was disrupted by war. And
yet this system, while metastable near the local minimum it
occupied since the 1890s, proved highly unstable to perturbations
which dislodged it from that perch. The mobilisation plans of the
land powers (Britain, characteristically, had no such plan and
expected to muddle through based upon events, but as the
preeminent sea power with global obligations it was, in a sense,
perpetually mobilised for naval conflicts) were carefully
choreographed at the level of detail of railroad schedules. Once
the “execute” button was pushed, events would begin
to occur on a nationwide scale: call-ups of troops, distribution
of supplies from armories, movement of men and munitions to
assembly points, rationing of key supplies, etc. Once one nation
had begun to mobilise, its potential opponents ran an enormous risk
if they did not also mobilise—every day they delayed was a
day the enemy, once assembled in battle order, could attack them
before their own preparations were complete.
This interlocking set of alliances and scripted mobilisation plans
finally proved lethal in 1914. On July 28, Austria-Hungary
declared war on Serbia and began mobilisation. Russia, as an
ally of Serbia and seeing its position in the Balkans
threatened, declared a partial mobilisation on July 29.
Germany, allied to Austria-Hungary and threatened by the Russian
mobilisation, decreed its own mobilisation on July 30. France,
allied with Russia and threatened by Germany, began
mobilisation on August 1st. Finally, Britain, allied with
France and Russia, declared war on Germany on August 4th.
Europe, at peace the morning of Tuesday, July 28th,
was, by the evening of Tuesday, August 4th, at war with itself,
almost entirely due to treaties and mobilisation plans
concluded in peacetime with the best of intentions, and
not overt hostilities between any of the main powers
involved.
It is a commonplace that World War I surpassed all historical
experience and expectations at its outbreak for the scale of
destruction and the brutality of the conflict (a
few prescient observers who had studied the second American war of
secession and developments in weaponry since then were
not surprised, but they were in the minority), but this
is often thought to have emerged in the period of static
trench warfare which predominated from
1915 until the very end of the war. But
this account makes clear that even the initial “war of
maneuver” in August and September 1914 was characterised
by the same callous squandering of life by commanders who adhered
to their pre-war plans despite overwhelming evidence from the
field that the assumptions upon which they were based were
completely invalid. Both French and German commanders sent
wave after wave of troops armed only with bolt-action rifles
and bayonets against fortified positions with artillery and
machine guns, suffering tens of thousands of casualties
(some units were almost completely wiped out) with no
effect whatsoever. Many accounts of World War I portray
the mindless brutality of the conflict as a product
of the trenches, but it was there from the very start,
inherent in the prevailing view that the citizen was the
property of the state to expend as it wished at the will
of the ruling class (with the exception of the British,
all armies in the conflict were composed largely of
conscripts).
Although originally published almost half a century ago,
this book remains one of the definitive accounts of the
origins of World War I and the first month of the
conflict, and one of outstanding literary merit (it is
a Pulitzer prize winner). John F. Kennedy read the book
shortly after its publication, and it is said to have made
such an impression upon him that it influenced his
strategy during the Cuban Missile Crisis, seeking to avoid
actions which could trigger the kind of reciprocal
automatic responses which occurred in the summer of 1914.
Those who bewail the soggy international institutions and
arrangements of the present day, where nothing is precisely
as it seems and every commitment is balanced with a dozen
ways to wiggle out of it, may find this book a cautionary
tale of the alternative, and how a crunchy system of alliances
may be far more dangerous. While reading the narrative,
however, I found myself thinking not so much about
diplomacy and military matters but rather how
much today's globalised economic and financial system
resembles the structure of the European great powers in
1914. Once again we hear that conflict is impossible
because the damage to both parties would be unacceptable;
that the system can be stabilised by “interventions”
crafted by wise “experts”; that entities
which are “too big to fail”, simply by being so
designated, will not; and that the system is ultimately
stable against an unanticipated perturbation which brings
down one part of the vast interlocking structure. These
beliefs seem to me, like those of the political class
in 1914, to be based upon hope rather than evidence, and
anybody interested in protecting their assets should think
at some length about the consequences should one or more
of them prove wrong.
October 2011 