The Pity of War by Niall Ferguson Allen Lane/Penguin Press 624pp, £18.99 in UK
The First World War by John Keegan Hutchinson 500pp, £25 in UK
We are Sarajevo's children. Our world was created by the assassination of the Archduke eighty-four years ago. From the two world wars which followed - in reality one war, but with two halves - resulted the defining characteristics of the 20th century - computers, satellite communications, intercontinental air travel, plastic surgery, the jet engine, television, space flight, totalitarianism, genocide, and the Americanised democracy of "nation-states" everywhere.
The world of 1914 was horse-drawn, dynastic, law-abiding (sort of), imperial; four years later, a non-dynastic criminal empire, posited on and sustained by pseudoscientific criminality, had in the USSR become a model for much of the rest of the world. Otherwise, the old empires in Europe were extinct, even as new states mushroomed to represent hitherto barely suspected identities. During halftime between the wars a new type of state criminality emerged in Germany, and genocide, pioneered informally in Turkish Armenia in 1915, became a formal policy, firstly in the USSR, next Germany. Soon new and ravishing technologies were transforming mankind's relationship with the world.
One needs to remember this because so many books about this period are written in the if-only mode - and Niall Ferguson's certainly is. John Keegan himself briefly employs the historical subjunctive and deplores the Great War as a tragic and unnecessary conflict. Yes, yes, yes, but is this not as true of the Falklands or Northern Ireland wars? And what does "unnecessary" mean? Just as we cannot travel back through time to prevent our own birth - a successful intervention necessarily meaning that we could never exist to intervene - without the past as it is, there is no present. The first World War is a necessary part of our history. It has made us all what we are; and without that event there is no knowing where world history would have proceeded.
This is even more important to bear in mind with Ferguson, who agrees with Immanuel Geiss that it would have been infinitely preferable if Germany's current hegemonic position within Europe had been achieved without two world wars. He blames the British government for transforming a continental war into a world war, thereby preventing Germany's peaceful dominance of Europe today.
Now, this is plain daft. Nobody could possibly have foreseen in 1914 that the direct and lineal consequence of the British government's intervention would be the emergence of two totalitarianisms covering much of Europe and ultimately the greater part of Asia, the virtual extermination of European Jewry, the arrival of intercontinental jet travel and even rockets leaving the solar system for the lightless vastness of outer space. To speculate today on the outcome for the world if the Germans had been allowed to subjugate Belgium, France and Russia is like speculating on farming quotas today if the famous dynosaur-exterminating comet had missed earth completely.
I labour this point because Niall Ferguson's iconoclastic view of history seems perched on a peak of omniscient what-iffery, admittedly fortified by an astounding ability to assimilate and assess information - his bibliography lists some six hundred published works. He is a classic enfant terrible, following an enormously erudite and thematic - rather than chronological - approach to the war. Yet l'enfant at times is both jeune and jejune, with judgments that are lightweight and ill-considered. "William II had not been personally responsible for the outbreak of war in 1914," he observes, largely, he says, because the Kaiser had tried to limit the extent of the Austrian occupation of Serbia; as well exonerate an arsonist who filled a building with petrol, but then tried to light only a little corner of it. Or, "the position of monarchs was bound to be threatened by a war which mobilised millions of men: at root, the First World War was democratic". Democratic was the last thing it was; but it was thoroughly demotic - one wonders whether he is aware of the difference. For notwithstanding the gusto and energy with which he writes, Ferguson is often uneasy with formal prose, sometimes unclear in his purpose, and too frequently reaching for lazy colloquialisms.
Of course, at thirty-one he is abominably young; John Keegan is in sturdy middle age. He, like all authors of military histories on the Great War, must live under the shadow of that conflict's Gibbon, C.R.M.F. Cruttwell, whose elegant prose, Georgian periods and epigrammatic pith mark to be one of the great (though still undeclared) masterpieces in English this century. Admirably for his time (1934; Ferguson's bibliography misleadingly cites the better-selling 1964 reprint), Cruttwell was punctiliously non-anglocentric.
So too is John Keegan. There is also a Cruttwellian wisdom to his writing which assures us that here is a man authoritatively and calmly in command of an impossibly complex subject; this surely is the creation of an entire lifetime engaged in studies - collateral, oblique, parallel - on related topics.
Take Turkey, one of the most grievous victims of war, its wartime death-toll unknown and unknowable. Ferguson mentions it, if only passingly, on fourteen occasions. Keegan's appendix lists thirty-nine references, but covering sixty-four pages, on one of which - and I sample at random - we learn that thirty thousand Ottoman soldiers froze to death in the Caucasus within a week in 1914, a catastrophe Ferguson doesn't even mention. Moreover, Keegan's clarity of language (not Cruttwell's, to be sure, for the civilisation which produced him vanished in the mud of Third Ypres) and of his strategic and tactical perception are unrivalled in English-language accounts of the war.
In brief, John Keegan's The First World War is perhaps the finest, the most broad-ranging, the most catholic single-volume account of the that war that has been written; yet Ferguson's will probably outsell it. But in ten years' time a slippered John Keegan beside the fire will nod proudly at his volume, while judicious critics will still acclaim it, and Ferguson will fret at having been tempted by the meretricious, the flip, the superficial. No matter; he is good, he is young, and will get better - but only with the aid of that vanishing species, a good editor.