9. World War One

A book by Max Egremont

Back in the Before Time, when such things were still possible, I went to the cinema. It was Monday, February 10—just shy of 150 days ago, although it feels like years—and I settled down in an aisle seat in Screen 2 at the (excellent) Brixton Ritzy for Sam Mendes’s critically-acclaimed feature 1917, which tells the story of two young British soldiers during the First World War who are given the seemingly impossible mission of delivering a message to call off a doomed attack. Given this is not a film review, all I’ll say is that it’s really very good and worth a watch if you haven’t seen it yet. During the course of the 119-minute runtime I was variously impressed, unnerved, thrilled, shocked, and moved.

Somewhat unexpectedly, I also felt chastened, because watching 1917 revealed a severe gap in my knowledge base, namely that I knew next to nothing about the First World War. In stark contrast to my knowledge of the Second World War—which I studied extensively at both school and university—all I could confidently say about the First World War was that it took place between 1914 and 1918 and was sparked by the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand.

In order to rectify this, I picked up Max Egremont’s book World War One. Part of the excellent Connell Guides series (the brainchild of The Week's founder, Jolyon Connell), it is essentially a 100ish-page textbook split into three sections: “The Causes of War”, “The War”, and “The Aftermath”. Subtitled “The Most Catastrophic Event in 20th Century European History”, Egremont’s book is exactly the succinct and informative guide I was looking for to at least partially fill the near-empty compartment in my brain labelled “WW1”.

The website for the Connell Guides describes the series as “advanced study guides for higher-level GCSE and A Level” students. They are learning resources, and as such would deserve little criticism if they were merely compendiums of facts. That is not, though, an accusation that could be levelled at Egremont’s book. It includes all the salient information, and is even-handed in outlining the causes of the war, the conflict itself, and the aftermath. This is all I was looking for. But World War One provides a great deal more than that despite its brevity. There are grace notes and asides that illuminate the times and make for a genuinely engaging read rather than a mere exercise in info-grabbing. I was, for example, vaguely aware of the remark: “The lamps are going out all over Europe; we shall not see them lit again in our life-time.” I did not know, though, that it was made by British Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey, who loved red squirrels and, despite evidence to the contrary, hated war. Nor did I know that Gavrilo Princip was presented his opportunity to assassinate Franz Ferdinand because the Archduke’s car stalled as it reversed ("a slow process in those days") back down a wrongly taken street.

Reading Egremont’s book provided me with the base knowledge I wanted about the First World War that now means I can at least boast a GCSE-level understanding of one of the most catastrophic events in human history. It also reminded me of the value of school-style learning resources. We all have blind spots, and in the interests of walking before we can run, sometimes it’s necessary to go back to basics on a subject and get the facts down pat. Facts, after all, are important.

To this end, the Connell Guides are a brilliant resource, as are the Oxford University Press’s Very Short Introductions.

My biggest takeaway from reading World War One, though, was a greater understanding of the futility of the whole endeavour. Unlike the Second World War, which can be reductively summarised as a bid to stop Hitler and the Nazis, the First World War lacks any such coherence. In the years preceding it, such a deadly conflict looked all but impossible. Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany, King George V of England, and Tsar Nicholas II of Russia were all cousins; couldn’t this devastating conflict which killed 16.5 million people have been prevented by a little family diplomacy? And having started in July 1914, by September both sides were “at the beginning of a stalemate that was to last nearly four years.” For what? Certainly not glory. As Egremont notes: “It was a war in which the victors paid a terrible price.” And yet “it settled so little”.