The Pity Of War: Explaining World War I
by Niall Ferguson

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Book Reviews of The Pity Of War: Explaining World War I

Book Review: a vital corrective to institutional liberal history
Summary: 5 Stars

At last though, in the past few years--not coincidentally following the Cold War and the end of its dissent stifling effects--conservative historians have finally begun to produce a coherent and fairly unified critique of the century's great wars and of American (and British) participation in them. The liberating winds of these new circumstances have allowed folks to take a fresh look at a myriad of issues, allowed for A. Scott Berg's rehabilitation of Charles Lindbergh, permitted even standard issue histories like David Kennedy's Freedom from Fear to at long last acknowledge the utter failure of the New Deal, allowed the nation to finally accept responsibility for the incarceration of Japanese-Americans, and so forth. But most importantly, it has led to a series of books on the threshold issue of whether fighting the wars was in our national interest to begin with. For instance, Pat Buchanan's A Republic not an Empire, though it was rather harshly denounced, raised important questions about whether it made sense for the U. S. to get involved in WWII. Niall Ferguson's Pity of War performs much the some service for British participation in the First World War, and was, not surprisingly, greeted with nearly equal vitriol.

Really more of an extended analytical essay than a history of the War, Ferguson sets out to answer a series of ten questions :

(1) Was the war inevitable, whether because of militarism, imperialism, secret diplomacy or the arms race?

(2) Why did Germany's leaders gamble on war in 1914?

(3) Why did Britain's leaders choose to intervene when war broke out on the Continent?

(4) Was the war, as is often asserted, really greeted with popular enthusiasm?

(5) Did propaganda, and especially the press, keep the war going...?

(6) Why did the huge economic superiority of the British Empire not suffice to inflict defeat on the Central Powers more quickly and without American intervention?

(7) Why did the military superiority of the German Army fail to deliver victory over the British and French armies on the Western Front, as it delivered victory over Serbia, Rumania and Russia?

(8) Why did men keep fighting when, as the war poets tell us, conditions on the battlefield were so wretched?

(9) Why did men stop fighting?

(10) Who won the peace--to be precise, who ended up paying for the war?

Because his answers to these questions are so uniformly at variance with the accepted version of history, Ferguson concludes that Britain's entry into the War was "nothing less than the greatest error of modern history." He argues that Germany had no global war aims, that she would have certainly won the war, but would have done little more than establish the same type of European trade union that modern Germany is rapidly creating. And given what Britain gave up, in terms of Empire, lives, and economic retardation, the war must therefore be seen as a complete waste.

I agree with those conclusions, but think he may actually be too timid in his argument. One of the criticisms of his analysis has been that Germany had wider aims and would have eventually confronted Britain. This seems almost absurd. Unless the other nations of Europe had truly collaborated with their conqueror it is hard to imagine how Germany could have even effectively held onto them, never mind turn and attack Britain while also subjugating the entire population of Europe.

There's also one strain that runs through the questions he asks, that I would have liked to see him address--the effect of democracy. It has long been assumed that democracy would tend to be more pacific than other forms of government : how then explain the nearly continuous state of war that the two great democracies, Britain and America, found themselves involved in during the 20th Century ? There would seem to be a series of interlocking causes, all functions of democracy, which contributed to this unlikely state of affairs. First, democracies are more unlikely to get involved in warfare in the first place. Opposing systems well understand this fact and are able to exploit it, so that they arm and strengthen themselves while democracies stand idly by and do nothing. If Britain really did have something to fear from German naval, colonial, and continental ambitions, the time to deal with Germany was twenty or more years earlier, when she was still weak. Similarly, Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan, the Soviet Union, Red China, etc., were all allowed to build themselves into serious military powers because Britain and America, their leaders beholden to the will of the people, did not stop them.

Second, when war finally does come, it is precisely because it is a democratic decision that our soldiers are likely to go right on fighting even in squalid and lethal conditions. It is the totalitarian powers which tend to have their armed forces quit on them, because, in some sense, it simply isn''t their fight.

Finally, the political and cultural dynamics of democracy require that every war the nation enters into be glorified and sanctified, because it was the will of the people. This means that democracies are nearly incapable of learning any lessons from these conflicts. To acknowledge that the war was a mistake would perhaps be too traumatic to the polity for such apostasy to stand. Thus, for all the cheap talk of "no more Munichs" the West does nothing even today as China tries to turn itself into a superpower, despite the obvious fact that their power will be aimed directly at us.

The only remaining question, raised by books like this one and Pat Buchanan's and the ones that will eventually be written about the futility of the Cold War and the Gulf War, is whether when the next war comes, the democracies (by which we really only mean Britain and America) will have sense enough to stay out of it. If enough people read and comprehend The Pity of War, we just might.

GRADE : A+

Summary of The Pity Of War: Explaining World War I

The Pity of War, with no pretensions to offering a grand narrative of the war, goes over its chosen questions like a polemical tract. As such it is immensely readable, well researched, and controversial. You may not end up agreeing with all of Ferguson's arguments, but that should not deter you from reading it. All of us need our deeply held views challenged from time to time, even if only to remind us why we've got them. --John Crace, Amazon.co.uk

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