The War to End All Wars? Lessons of World War I Revisited

The role of World War I in shaping the twentieth century is becoming ever more obvious. It triggered the collapse of the three major empires of eastern Europe and central Asia: Russia, Austria-Hungary, and Turkey. It gave rise to the Russian Revolution and to the Soviet Union; it prompted the first major U.S. incursion into world affairs; and it both failed to resolve the problems of the Balkans and generated new ones in the Middle East. These perspectives on World War I have become even more immediate since the collapse of the Soviet Union. It is small wonder, then, that in a 1998 opinion poll, French students ranked the war as the second most important event of the last century, trailing behind only its successor. In fact, the agenda in 1914 was so important that much of it is still on the table.

As commonplace as that realization may now be, however, it has not prompted a scholarly reassessment of the war itself. Its connotations of waste, futility, and military incompetence have remained remarkably persistent and indeed were restated in the two main British-authored works published to mark the 80th anniversary of 1918: John Keegan's World War I and Niall Ferguson's The Pity of War. For these authors, as for many of the conflict's participants, the war was a behemoth, possessed of a life and dynamic of its own and creating unintended consequences independent of the designs of either statesmen or generals. The war, or so the story goes, proved Clausewitz's much-abused aphorism spectacularly wrong: it was not a political instrument, but an end in itself.

A PAST WITH PURPOSE

It is high time to lay this phantom to rest. As Stephane Audoin-Rouzeau and Annette Becker emphasize in 14-18, historians brought up in the shadow of the war -- Marc Bloch, Pierre Chaunu, and Raoul Girardet -- were in no doubt as to its definitive meaning. The invasion of 1914 propelled France, as the war did other belligerents, into existential crisis. Its citizens saw the war as one in defense not only of the nation but also of the civilization that France embodied. And in Paris 1919 Margaret MacMillan argues -- both robustly and rightly -- that Woodrow Wilson brought to the peace settlement an ambition and a vision that were consonant with the war's scale and significance. But the war's meaning languished in the 1930s and died in 1939 as World War II proved that its predecessor had not, after all, been the war to end all wars. The opportunity to recover World War I's sense of purpose first arose (but was not taken) in 1964, when the historian Fritz Fischer argued that Germany had both sought the war and fought it to dominate Europe and carve out empires on the continent and farther afield. He detected a continuity in German history that linked the Kaiserreich to Hitler's Third Reich. Fischer may now stand corrected -- most historians today believe that Germany did not deliberately plan to go to war -- but it is extraordinary that so few historians at the time used the notion of German aggression to validate the fighting on the western front.

In contrast, both 14-18 and Paris 1919, each of them extraordinarily lucid on complex themes, provide the ammunition with which to make another, more sophisticated attempt to recover the war's significance. Both books are determined to avoid determinism: the knowledge of World War II must not be allowed to shape the search for guilty parties in World War I. Audoin-Rouzeau and Becker's 14-18 is divided into three sections, titled "Violence," "Crusade," and "Mourning." The first is concerned with the suffering and loss both at the front and -- just as important -- in the rear; the second examines the ideological underpinnings of the conflict, from defensive patriotism to religious faith; and the third looks at grief and bereavement, whether expressed collectively or personally. Whereas 14-18 is a slim, distilled work, MacMillan's Paris 1919 is more weighty -- a sustained study of six months' hectic negotiating as the allies tried to reach consensus among themselves on the demands that they would make of the defeated Central Powers. The fact that the peace settlement could not deliver on the more utopian strains in its agenda was not itself, MacMillan argues, the cause for its ultimate failure. Nor would she agree with the authors of 14-18, who believe that the undoing of the peace conference lay in the contradiction implicit in the participants' use of World War I to justify the proceedings while endeavoring to make war impossible in the future. Rather, MacMillan is much more indulgent of the statesmen of 1919. She believes that the failure of Versailles was due less to the bickering, vengefulness, and far-flung sentiments prevalent in 1919 than to the irresolution of the negotiators' successors and their unwillingness to enforce the settlement's terms.

Audoin-Rouzeau and Becker are directors of the Historial de la Grande Guerre in Peronne, and their book offers a splendidly readable synoptic introduction to the comparative and interdisciplinary work of that research center. The translation is smooth and, by and large, free of technical misunderstandings. Since the historial's focus is on mentalities, not international relations, its directors might be expected to join in the vale of tears that characterizes so much writing on the war. In fact, their approach in 14-18 is much more hard-headed.