The End of the World
By Tony Judt
Published: June 27, 1999
THE FIRST WORLD WAR
By John Keegan.
Illustrated. 475 pp. New York:
Alfred A. Knopf. $35.
It is not easy to convey to Americans, especially young Americans, the experience of World War I and its significance for our century. To be sure, the United States took part in that war and 114,000 American servicemen died -- twice the number killed in Vietnam. But more Americans were killed in World War II (292,000), and both figures pale beside the casualties of the Civil War (in excess of 600,000). American involvement in World War I lasted just 19 months; as a result, although the rate of American deaths per month was high, the experience was brief. And the war was fought a long way away, its echoes only belatedly reaching these shores.
British military losses in World War II were comparable to those of the United States -- 265,000 servicemen and women killed. But they pale into relative statistical and human insignificance against the horrors of the earlier conflict. On a small hill above the northern French village of Thiepval, 20 miles south of Arras, there is a poignant memorial listing the names of the 70,000 British soldiers missing or unidentified following the battle there in the summer of 1916.
Thiepval lies in the valley of the Somme River, athwart the trench lines of the Western Front. The countryside today is soft and green, the villages peaceful (and all reconstructed after 1918). But at the Battle of the Somme, which was just one of dozens of major and minor confrontations along this front during the four years of war, the British suffered 420,000 casualties, the French 195,000, the Germans 600,000. On the very first day of the Battle of the Somme, July 1, 1916, in just 24 hours, 20,000 British soldiers were killed and a further 40,000 wounded.
This was, as John Keegan writes in ''The First World War,'' ''the greatest loss of life in British military history.'' Together with the third Battle of Ypres, in July 1917 (better known as the Battle of Passchendaele, from the name of the Belgian village where it took place), where 70,000 British soldiers were killed and 170,000 wounded, the Somme broke the back of the old British Army, and more besides: ''The Somme marked the end of an age of vital optimism in British life that has never been recovered.''
But the British won World War I, a war fought on foreign territory in which fewer than 2,000 British civilians were killed. The significance of the war for the Germans, who lost it and with it some two million men, or for the French, upon whose land it was fought and who lost 1.7 million men in action, can only be imagined. In 1918 there were 630,000 war widows in France, and many tens of thousands of single women who would never marry -- they could still be seen as late as the 1960's, grown old, working at menial tasks in the public sector (clipping subway tickets, cleaning toilets), a gloomy reminder of the Great War, like the memorials to the dead on virtually every village square in the land.
That is how World War I was experienced in western Europe. In eastern Europe the carnage was equally bad. In Serbia some 15 percent of the population was killed; the Russians lost at least as many men as the French (though a much smaller proportion of the population); and the Turkish losses were never even calculated, though there were certainly many hundreds of thousands. If the memory of World War I is less present in the east, it is only because the military (and especially civilian) losses there during World War II were even worse. But the war in eastern Europe was like previous wars there, with men and horses traversing vast landscapes -- it would have been recognizable to Napoleon in its scale and movement. In the west it had descended into 475 miles of trenches by November 1914 and remained there for nearly four years. That is why the classic image of World War I in Britain and the United States is of an infantry soldier living, or dying, in a muddy puddle, and why, when we think of the Great War, we think of the Western Front.
John Keegan is a military historian, perhaps the best military historian of our day, and his new history of the war exemplifies his many strengths. It is elegantly written, clear, detailed and omniscient. As a narrative it is outstanding, telling the story of how the war began, how it was fought, why it was won by the Allies. Above all, Keegan conveys how it felt. To our eyes World War I can seem mysterious: Why did such a pointless war take place? How could such useless carnage have lasted so long? Why did men continue to serve, and fight, in such unspeakable conditions? Keegan never plays down these concerns, but he addresses them in terms contemporaries would have understood.
The war began with a series of incidents and decisions, taken with little thought for their consequences; and no one, least of all the German generals responsible for urging it upon their rulers, expected it to take the form it did or last so long. In that sense, Germany's military leaders can hardly be held responsible for having begun what became the Great War, since they never intended it. Of the professional soldiers who fought its early battles, Keegan writes that they ''died in their thousands at Ypres not because of an ideal of self-sacrifice but because it was expected of them and, in any case, there was no alternative.''