For all the studies which have poured from scholars over the decades, one historian of the Great War stood quite massively alone: CRMF Cruttwell. His magisterial work, limpid and stately in tone, presumed upon both the scholarship and the contemporary knowledge of its readers. The men he wrote about were of his generation, as was his original audience, and no subsequent scholar could ever attempt to describe the Great War without feeling Cruttwell's presence brooding over his shoulder.
Historians after Cruttwell could not have implicitly known the details of everyday life which would have been part of the common stock of knowledge of those who lived through the time - the type of cigarettes people smoked, what toothbrushes were made of and when they were used, how often people changed underwear or bought shoes, what brand of tea they drank, and what they had for breakfast.
From the first sentence of this quite masterly work, one feels that its author, Hew Strachan, is the confident master of such quotidian bric-a-brac, not merely in Georgian Britain, but over much of the world. His bibliography is astounding, as is the effortlessness with which he wraps contemporary details into his narrative.
Still, it was pleasing to note that, in one of the first naval actions of the war, the author seems to have confused Capt Francis Kennedy, commander of HMS Indomitable and Indefatigable, with one of the two Kelly brothers, John, commander of HMS Gloucester and William, of HMS Dublin (later, as it happens, to win a DSO). Such petty nitpicking makes a reviewer's life endurable.
And reviewers do need reassurance when they encounter a book which makes them so deeply aware of their inferiority. I have never read such a volume as this, nor met such learning, so exhaustively acquired, and so easily and unostentatiously displayed. Moreover, in addition to the scholarship, there is a moral rigour, a studious impartiality, which one seldom encounters in anglophone accounts of the Great War (John Keegan being another rare example).
And though the author has detached himself from the anglocentric lens which for so long historiographically made it a largely British war, he has none the less stopped short of consulting all the primary sources necessary for a truly world view - for this would require mastery of written Serbo-Croat, Russian, Turkish, Arabic, Polish, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, Georgian, Armenian, Greek, Azerbaijani, not to speak of the obvious languages of the Western front. Which is probably as well: the most likely result of such scholarship would be death. Even confining his research to the main languages of Western Europe - German offering a perspective to much of the Eastern European conflicts - the author has produced the most authoritative account of the first year of the war yet written. However, I would argue strongly that he was wrong, both thematically and sequentially, not to put the German atrocities in Belgium in this volume.
He tells us this is because he wishes us to locate those atrocities within a consideration of propaganda in the war, to appear in a later volume. Thus the cart proceeds before the horse. But perhaps he (no doubt sensibly) hopes to learn from the eagerly awaited study of the Belgian massacres, and the mythology around their non-existence, from TCD's John Horne before he deals with them himself.
Otherwise, there seems hardly an aspect of the war and its tools of which he is not a master, from the detonation point of the French 75mm artillery piece - 1.3 metres above ground, actually - to the linguistic problems of the Ottoman army - wrongly to my mind, referred to in the index as the Turkish army. For, as the author himself reports, only 40 per cent of the total population spoke Turkish, and the grand vizier, Said Halim, could not write it. Moreover, Turkish appeared in four written forms, but without standardised spelling, which made military communications at best somewhat parlous.
Much has been made in English-speaking studies of the little drama that occurred outside Mons on August 22nd, when Corporal E. Thomas, from Nenagh, Co Tipperary, of the Royal Irish Dragoons, fired the first shots by a British soldier in the Great War. That this should even be an item of knowledge is anglophone pettiness at its most diseased; for upon that very day, 27,000 French soldiers were killed in action in the battles of the frontiers, and over that entire week, a total of 75,000 French soldiers were killed in a total casualty figure which exceeded a quarter of a million. No day, no week, in the coming experiences of the British army, could compare.
Calamity was not a dish confined to the French in those first months of the war. The Ottoman empire supped at a comparably dismal banquet at Christmas in 1914, when Tommies and Fritzes were kicking footballs in Flanders. With temperatures at a mean of -35 degrees centigrade, the men of the sultan's XI Corps were ordered to abandon great coats and backpacks in order to facilitate their advance through snowdrifts. So even before the Corps joined battle with the Romanov army, it had suffered 60 per cent casualties from frostbite and exposure.
With two more corps, it was then put to the sword at Sarikamish by the Russians, who later found 30,000 frozen Ottoman corpses on the field, with countless thousands littering the mountain passes leading to this icebound Golgotha. Nothing that was to occur on the Western front during the 52 months of war matches the epic futility or wanton suffering of that single and largely forgotten encounter.
The achievements of this superb book are many, but the most lasting should be the de-anglicising of a war which was a calamity for many nations. Admirably lucid in execution, masterly in purview, magisterial in scholarship, Strachan's first volume of his account of the first World War has finally laid old Cruttwell's bones to rest. How I yearn for volume II.
Kevin Myers is an Irish Times journalist