Over the last year of the COVID pandemic, I have found myself contemplating past historic events in a new light.
The suddenness of the changes that the pandemic brought to every day life and the feeling that the changes may be permanent is not unique to 2020-21. Many articles have focused on the Spanish flu or the bubonic plague of the Middle Ages for similarities. However, you might do better to look at the events that led up to the cataclysmic event of World War I. That is exactly what Margaret MacMillan’s, The War That Ended Peace, so vividly describes.
Ms. MacMillan, a distinguished historian from Canada, describes with great detail the men and events that led to the fateful declarations of war by European countries. As with her other book about this period, 1919: Six Months That Changed The World, she gives the reader the feeling of being in the room with the Kaiser as he gives his contradictory commands as well as feeling the despair of those diplomats who tried to stop Armageddon.
If you have read the mountain of books on World War I, one of the most disturbing facts about the war is the casual manner that leaders discussed so openly and for so long the coming of “a war.” It is here that I think Ms. MacMillian does an excellent job of drawing the long line of crisis that began in the latter half of the century to the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand in 1914. The successful negotiations of the period demonstrate that it was possible until 1912 for diplomacy to put out fires. As the events of the summer of 1914 begin to unravel peace, the average citizen went joyfully off to summer holiday. Once again , you are struck by the suddenness of the war.
That suddenness took even to some of the leaders by surprise. But as often happens in history, the generation that was beginning to take the reins of power in all of these countries, had a different mindset. It is striking that in France, Germany, Russia and Austria-Hungary there were so many disenfranchised populations each with their own grievances and many seeing violence as their only alternative. That so many of these countries viewed the coming war as a uniting factor clearly illustrates leaders did not fully comprehend how far military technology had developed. The Nye Commission of the United States that blamed the war on the armament industry should also have found guilty the leaders who ignored the warnings that technology had outpaced military tactics. Perhaps they should have paid more attention to the horrific battles of the American Civil War.
I have only one criticism of the book which is Ms. Mac Millan at several parts points to similarities of the current day. This is not necessarily bad, but with such a superb book I thought she should have had the confidence to allow the reader to make those conclusions themselves.
Bowery & Canal 