It is difficult to put together a single volume history of the First World War but this is one of the good ones that I can recommend to someone just wanting to get into the subject. ( )

You need maps if you are going to read this. You REALLY need maps. ( )

This is actually my third time reading this audio book. I read it for the second time more than a year ago. As many times as I have listened to Simon Preble read this book now, I still feel that there is too much detailed information for me to get as much out of listening to this book as I might get from eyeballing the text. But it is not only the amount of information that gets to me so much as the weight of it in terms of the amount of material, the vastness of the regions involved and the staggering loss of life. Countries lost ten, thirteen, or seventeen percent of their young men. These casualties numbered in the millions for some nations. Where they numbered in the hundreds of thousands, it is only because these were small countries to begin with or, as in the case of the Turks, because they just never kept good count of their losses.

The author's description of the war as tragic and unnecessary is brought home by his description of the steps that led to it. Austria and Russia share equal blame for being slaves to treaties that they could have ignored. Competing factions in Germany either wanted war or wanted to avoid it; if only cooler heads had won the day. But they did not. And so, the Schlieffen plan--a military plan designed by Count Alfred von Schlieffen, a field marshal who died a year before the war began, was brought out and handed to Helmuth von Moltke, the son of his namesake who had conquered France for Chancellor Otto von Bismarck, and incidentally for the first Kaiser Wilhelm, back in 1870, but Moltke the Younger was not his father and he changed Schlieffen's plan in ways that put the brunt of his attack into what Schlieffen had intended as a feint, while turning the part of the attack that was supposed to be the main thrust into a feint. Keegan acknowledges this at one point, but mainly seems to think that the plan was poor to begin with. Schlieffen himself, says Keegan, thought that the material logistics required to make his plan work could not be satisfactorily organized and coordinated.

The massive technology brought to bear by each side on the other was monumental. Two kinds of gas warfare were developed and used. Huge guns with distant ranges, heavy machine guns, the first use of tank warfare, all merged together in the First World War, but communications were still backward and the generals often had no way of coordinating attacks except with the low tech expediant of having soldiers run from one position to another carrying handwritten messages. (This was the job of Cpl. Adolf Hitler who is mentioned once in passing when describing his Bavarian unit's engagement near Ypres.)

But 1914 is rightly considered the end of the "long 19th century" as conceived by world historians. (The long 19th runs from 1750 to 1914.) The ninteenth century was not quite over as troops initially marched off to war with equipment that would be rendered antique by the war's end. Consider the tank, which had not gotten the kinks out yet and tended to mire in mud. Late in the war, when they were used on a battlefield made of dry, chalky soil, they nearly turned the tide but were nevertheless backed up by cavalry--men on actual horses.

Keegan reminds us that this war really was a world war: the Allies--who included Italy and Japan--took most of Germany's colonies from her in Africa and the Pacific. A naval battle was fought off the coast of South America. As it would again in World War Two, Germany fought the French and British (and later the Americans) on the western front and the Russians on the eastern.

The French and Austrians--both brought to heel by Germany in the mid-nineteenth century--actually started out well in the First World War, but both eventually foundered. The French lost too many men and were forced by the Germans to fight alone as the Germans divided the allies in hope of thereby conquering. The Austrians fought the Italians with some success but the Russians less successfully and were weakened to the point where the Germans had to take the lead militarily.

Stalemate was the theme of the war, especially on the western front where the battle zone became almost rigidly fixed, shifting only slightly from time to time, while a few miles from the war zone the civilians lived in relative peace. There were places on the eastern front where this happened to some extent, as well.

After its Austrian ally collapsed, Germany was left alone to fight the world, and it is no wonder that General Erich Ludendorff concluded that there was no way for Germany to win (even though he later subscribed to the myth that Germany only lost because politicians stabbed the army in the back).

Keegan ends by pointing to the aftermath of the war. The Second World War was a continuation of the first, he says. Those who went home after the war often harbored thoughts of revenge. The Allies took revenge on the Central Powers by forcing them to put up with impossible terms including admitting to having caused the war and paying exorbitant reparations, the loss of territory and the dismantling of the military, the blockade of German ports. The Austrian Empire was divided into several new countries and German cities were taken over by Bolsheviks. Adolf Hitler gave voice to the German mood when he called for rejection of the Allied terms and their systematic undermining until Germany was a world power once again, only to plunge once more into world war. ( )

Den moderna världen kan sägas vara en skapelse av det första världskriget. Ett sekel av relativt lugn och samhällelig blomstring avbröts av detta utbrott av tidigare ej skådat krigiskt vanvett. Det tjugonde århundratets demoner släpptes lösa och dörren till en närmast pastoral värld stängdes för alltid.

Pedestrian review of World War I. Nothing much gained, but a nice overview if that is what you are looking for. ( )