The
Great
War
An Imperial History
John W. Morrow, Jr.
(Routledge)

Part II

The riots and strikes that took place in Germany, Austria-Hungary, Italy and France, and --- finally --- the Bolshevik revolution in Russia were a product of what Morrow calls "the catastrophe of epidemic proportions" which Europeans "wreaked on themselves." And, equally, the author tells us, on the colonial soldiers who were inveigled into fighting on one side or the other. The war rendered whole regions wastelands, Morrow tells us:

Battlefields remained dangerous and muddy moonscapes littered with the human and material debris of war. Occupying forces had systematically looted and pillaged entire countries. Death, dislocation, and destruction occurred globally, in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East, wherever the heavy hand of European empire had extended.

Morrow's hook --- every historian needs a hook --- is the impact of the war on the colonial nations and their colonies, but the space dedicated to this side of the war is somewhat minimal, although the figures are just as scandalous.

For instance, a million African soldiers turned up on the various fronts --- mostly as "bearers and porters." 150,000 died. The French sent in Senegalese soldiers at the head of the attacks at the Somme because of, according to one General Pierre Bedoulat, their "limited intellectual abilities" which made them useful "for sparing a certain number of European lives at the moment of assaults."

The most interesting part of The Great War does not concern the trenches nor the imperial colonies. Rather, it is the Oberkommando Ost, the German plans to creating a "new land" to the east, imposing the superior German Kultur on the inferior populations in Poland, Russia, Latvia and Estonia. Despite the harsh peace at Versailles, the German nation merely had to wait two decades to begin to implement Ober Ost with a special, Teutonic viciousness.

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Morrow's year-by-year, country-by-country approach to WWI is as tedious as a case of trenchfoot, and his prose can be as drab as the stalemate he is trying to describe. His language turns a bit snarly at times: "The Rusians, enraged, began to fulminate." He calls Mussolini "a thuggish demagogue." Rasputin is a "sleazy monk" and "lascivious." All these may be true but we could do with a bit more eloquence when describing two of the key figures of the 20th Century.

We have suggested in these pages that good writing on the origins, the reality, and the lasting impact of WWI is rare. The Guns of August by Barbara W. Tuchman and Margaret MacMillan's astute and lively Paris 1919: Six Months that Changed the World are good, and good examples for future historians. For a minor event that had a major impact --- it helped to bring in the U. S. --- there is Tuchman's droll take on the Zimmermann Telegram.

14 - 18: Understanding The Great War by Stéphane Audoin-Rouzeau and Annette Becker personalizes the immense personal suffering imposed by the war, and In Flanders Fields by Leon Wolff is one of the best on the day-to-day in the trenches and the battlefields. Two interesting poems on the conflict can be found at "Loos" and "The Soldiers."

But the prize winner of them all, a graceful (if one is allowed to use that word in describing general mayhem) book, constructed far more artfully than Morrow's, indeed, better than most, is Gerard J. De Groot's The First World War. His was the first, I believe, to propound the astonishing notion that

The war on the Western Front is unique but not very interesting. It is no wonder that there are so few good films or war novels about it. Quite simply, it is difficult to construct a plot around 44 months of stalemate. But there is a story to be told. Little happened, but millions died.

And, finally, he writes, succinctly,

In any country, foreign policy is formulated by a very small group of individuals who contemptuously ignore popular opinion. Governments go to war not because of mysterious forces swirling in the air but for purely pragmatic reasons.

In his fourteen page bibliography, John H. Morrow doesn't mention Wolff, De Groot --- or most astonishing of all --- Barbara W Tuchman. Not even in passing.

--- --- M. J. Carswell, PhD