THE HISTORIANS' WAR

...That's what Britain would have been had Germany prevailed in the First World War...

...Germany financed the war by expropriating the savings of its middle class...

...His father, his father-in-law, and two of his uncles served in the British armies, and with The Face of Battle, he produced what is universally acclaimed one of the best accounts ever written of the actual experience of combat...

...But war or no war, she was declining, because of the failure of her economy to continue to lead...

...Montenegro, Japan, Romania, Greece, and Portugal would join the Allied side...

...That's what the United States will be on the day its readiness to defend itself falters...

...Russia supported Serbia for fear that Austria would extend its empire deeper into the Balkans...

...After nine blood-soaked decades, Europe has at last laboriously reestablished a continent-wide order nearly as enlightened, decent, and free as the one that prevailed in July 1914...

...By torturing the plotters, the Austrians quickly discovered the involvement of the Serbian military, if not the government of Serbia, in the assassination...

...And from John Maynard Keynes to A.J.I...

...In The First World War, Keegan candidly acknowledges the amateurishness of the American soldiers (except for the Marines) and the defects of American tactics: General John Pershing refused to believe he could learn anything from the stuck-up Frogs and Limeys, and he ordered lines of doughboys to charge German machine guns in frontal assaults reminiscent of the worst slaughters of the early months of the war...

...The great constraint on striking power in 1914 was not manpower but road surface...

...Such a Europe would in no way resemble the modern European Union, a confederacy of democracies in which Germany happens to be the richest...

...As Keegan sees it, much of the horror of the First World War was an appalling accident of timing...

...Probably the best explanation is the unique strength of British trade unions, which had already by 1900 loaded onto British industry the most restrictive business practices in the developed world...

...Ferguson approaches the war from an unusual angle...

...At least 8 million civilians died violently or from starvation...

...The Allies expected at least another year of fighting...

...His previous essay on World War I, "1917 and All That," appeared in the April 28, 1997 issue...

...If Ferguson wanted to argue a radical position, he might have tried this one: Britain did not decline because of the First World War...

...Britain and America—the winners of the war—had already defaulted on their obligation to build an international economic order in which there was room for Germany to earn the money to pay France and Belgium...

...One of the enduring mysteries of the war is how Germany managed to survive as long as it did when its enemies so outnumbered it...

...Taylor, that spirit of regret has all too often drifted into actual apologetics for Germany...

...The famous Schlieffen plan was, Keegan insists, doomed from the start...

...Likewise, because British wealth and power never recovered from the war, British historians are understandably tempted to wish that their country had never joined it and to write about the war in a spirit of regret over "what might have been...

...Keegan thus resists the temptation (succumbed to by the author of one of the early classic histories of the war, Basil H. Liddell Hart) to condemn Allied generals as idiots while leaving the impression that the German generals were a collection of Erwin Rommels...

...But the disproportion between America's sacrifices and Britain's (and the shabby way that the United States treated Britain after 1918) means that it takes a very fair-minded British writer to do justice to America's contribution to winning the war...

...Perhaps that's true, although Ferguson offers no evidence for it...

...In this sense, John Keegan's The First World War is the opposite of brilliant: It is instead lucid, impartial, and authoritative...

...And in the same understated style as the British Imperial war cemeteries in France, it is quietly heart-rending...

...As a result, the history of the First World War is a topic that Americans have tended to leave to British writers...

...There's nothing necessarily wrong with that...

...It cost about $180 billion in the money of the day (at a time when $1 bought one-twentieth of an ounce of gold, or fifteen times as much as today), and that's not counting the reconstruction of northern France and southern Belgium or the postwar cost of caring for the crippled and the orphaned...

...By the time it had come to an end, 578,000 Italian soldiers were dead, 800,000 Ottomans, 920,000 from the British Empire, 1.1 million from the Habs-burg domains, 1.4 million Frenchmen, 1.8 million Russians, and 2 million Germans...

...When, for example, Ferguson attacks the notion that Germany went to war in 1914 because it felt strong, he's attacking something believed by almost nobody...

...World War I began—as we have had cause to be frequently reminded in recent months—in a quarrel between Serbia and the Habsburgs' Austro-Hun-garian Empire over Bosnia...

...Keegan does not make excuses for Douglas Haig and the other blood-soaked butchers of the high command...

...But whatever the explanation, it does suggest that the right might-have-been for Britain is, "How could we have maintained our economic edge...

...Statues of Lenin toppled across Russia, annulling 1917...

...It's true that the Germans were better fighters: "From August 1914 until June 1918," Ferguson observes, "there was not a single month in which the Germans failed to kill or capture" more soldiers on the Western front than they lost...

...Ferguson's The Pity of War has attracted attention most of all for its argument that Britain ought to have stayed out of the First World War...

...But Keegan also stresses the extent to which the United States was absolutely crucial to Allied victory...

...Ferguson has produced a dazzlingly ambitious attempt to write not a narrative history, but a debunking of what he bills as ten "broadly held myths" about the war...

...The causes of this failure are much debated...

...Had the Austrians struck immediately, there would probably have been no wider war: Everyone in Europe more or less agreed that the Serbs deserved what was coming to them...

...The key, Ferguson determines, was Germany's superior management of its military resources...

...Under those circumstances, Britain would have ceased to be a great power just as rapidly as it did in actual fact...

...In The Pity of War, the younger Scottish historian Niall Ferguson instead presents the war as a catastrophic caesura in world history, a calamity whose strategic and tactical aspects are perhaps the least interesting thing about it...

...He is a financial historian (his previous book was a history of the house of Rothschild), and he never loses sight of the truth that paying for the war was an absolute precondition for fighting it...

...But it was not mere truculence that caused Germany to default...

...In The First World War, the magisterial English military historian John Kee-gan—author of such classics as 1976's The Face of Battle—writes of the war precisely as a war: uniquely horrible, but still intelligible in the same way that the Napoleonic Wars and the Second World War are intelligible...

...The First World War was the most expensive thing the human race had ever until then done...

...Ferguson is right that Germany should have been made to help rebuild France and Belgium...

...The Austrian government presented Serbia with a stiff set of punitive demands, while the Austrian army drew up invasion plans...

...But the technologies that could coordinate them purposefully—the field radio, the tank, the airplane—were still to come...

...And when the offensive sputtered out, the Germans began their long retreat knowing that 250,000 Americans a month were landing in France—more reinforcements than Germany could expect in an entire year— and that four million more were in training in the United States, a force larger than the entire remaining German army...

...None of this is ever far from European minds...

...In 1967, the leading scholar of the subject, Fritz Fischer, offered impressive documentary evidence that the German war aims of World War I bore an uncanny resemblance to the German war aims of World War II: a continent-wide system of economic exploitation...

...On the narrow roads of those days, a single army corps extended almost twenty miles...

...But what grounds do we actually have to believe that the sort of rule a victorious Germany would have fastened on the continent would look like the European Union...

...Ferguson dismisses Fischer's work, but—in curious contrast to the painstaking care of most of the rest of the book— at this all-important juncture he substitutes unsubstantiated assertion for proof...

...Had Germany won the war in 1915, its aims would have been less radical...

...The Ottoman Empire declared war in November 1914, and Italy in May 1915...

...And that second great war, by drawing Soviet soldiers into the heart of Europe, engendered in turn the Cold War—^which would not end until the fall of the Berlin Wall on November 9, 1989, seventy-one years to the day after Kaiser Wilhelm's abdication...

...Keegan is a lecturer at the British military academy, Sandhurst, and the military affairs correspondent for the Daily Telegraph...

...The brave counter-position Ferguson claims as his own—that Germany went to war because its leaders felt weak and feared that Russian industrialization would leave them weaker still—is held by almost all modern historians...

...Only if we decide what lessons to learn from the First World War are we right to hope that the awfulness of the past century forms merely a detour and not an eternally recurring pattern in European history, for that war and its consequences can never really be left behind...

...But for Americans, World War I looms a much smaller memory than World War II or the Civil War...

...Germany backed Austria for fear that its only friend in Europe would otherwise lose a war to Russia...

...it may have been spared the terrible physical damage inflicted on France and Belgium, but it was teetering politically, locked out of world markets by discriminatory tariffs, and convulsed economically...

...Sergeant York aside, the First World War threw up few American heroes...

...But so what...

...If "brilliance" is coming up with an idea that nobody ever thought to say before, then we pay undue honor to intellectual flash when we make brilliance the touchstone of excellence— since the most common reason that nobody has thought to say a particular thing is that the thing is wrong...

...There's a lesson in this for America...

...What Ferguson neglects to mention, however, is the reason that Germany's debt was as low as 160 percent...

...The Young Plan of 1929 envisaged a payout of about 3 percent of German national income a year for sixty years—a not unimaginable stretch of time when one considers that modern Germany has been, as Ferguson notes, a net contributor to the European Union budget for forty years now...

...Ferguson contends that Britain was not bound to come to the aid of France and Belgium in August 1914...

...The fatal shots were fired on the intermittently famous anniversary of the 1389 Battle of Kosovo...

...On August 1, Germany, Austria, France, and Russia all mobilized...

...By fighting Germany in 1914, Asquith, Grey and their colleagues helped ensure that, when Germany did finally achieve predominance on the continent, Britain was no longer strong enough to provide a check on it...

...A German victory would instead have ushered in a premature Cold War between two world powers, the United States and a German-ruled continent of Europe, only with the ships and armies of the illiberal great power based on the south shore of the English Channel...

...It was this three-to-one disparity in killing efficiency that kept Germany in the fight for four and a half years...

...The German army in November 1918 was still intact and in occupation of foreign soil...

...Serbia wanted it...

...But Ferguson's overhyping of his originality does not entirely diminish his achievement...

...The war weakened Britain because it deprived her of the accumulated wealth that would otherwise have cushioned her decline...

...as Prime Minister Lloyd George savagely quipped: "The solicitude with which most generals in high places (there were honorable exceptions) avoided personal jeopardy is one of the debatable novelties of modern warfare...

...Brilliant," however, is exactly the word to describe Niall Ferguson's The Pity of War...

...True, France would have lost had Britain not...

...Ferguson ought to have thought harder about the implications of his observation that Britain spent relatively more to defeat Napoleon than it did to beat the Kaiser—but that Britain nevertheless dominated the nineteenth century economically...

...On examination, his broadly held myths usually turn out to be either not broadly held or not myths...

...But this alone would not have sufficed, given the Allies' overwhelming economic advantage...

...millions more perished in the 1918-19 influenza epidemic exacerbated by the destruction of the war...

...Some 15 million men were wounded, almost half of them maimed for life...

...Above all, most of the fighting was done by foreigners: America lost 114,000 men in the war, not even half as many as Romania...

...This is the section of his work excerpted in the Atlantic Monthly and the argument that inspired the New Yorker to publish a lengthy article about him...

...John Keegan's elegant new book, however, avoids both dangers...

...In fact, if any high command was criminally irresponsible, it was Germany's...

...and not "How could we have accommodated ourselves to the Kaiser...

...This same close attention to numbers leads Ferguson into some of his most ingenious but least convincing suggestions...

...Keegan argues that there simply was not room on the paved roads of northern France for an army the size that von Schlieffen's plan required, and he identifies despairing hints in the text of the plan that suggest von Schlieffen himself knew it...

...In those four and a half years of the First World War lie the causes of the Second...

...But even moderate aims would have been bad enough: economic and military control of Europe from Spain to Poland by an illiberal, militarized regime...

...By 1914, the killing technologies of the twentieth century—the machine gun, the high explosive shell, the grenade—were all available...

...On August 4, German troops entered Belgium, and Britain entered the war against Germany and Austria...

...There are plenty of examples, of which the eighteenth-century Netherlands is the most familiar...

...Ferguson argues that Germany could thus have afforded to honor its debt and pay as well its reparations to the Allies...

...France joined Russia for fear that Germany and Austria would defeat its main ally...

...But Keegan convincingly argues that one reason World War I cast up no military men like World War II's Montgomery and Patton is that 1914 offered no possibility for them...

...In The First World War, John Keegan puts it starkly: More than one out of every three German boys aged nineteen to twenty-two at the outbreak of the war was killed from 1914 to 1918...

...and the eightieth anniversary of the signing of the Treaty of Versailles, both on June 28—are two of the most important books in many years about the war and its aftermath...

...He grimly calculates that "whereas it cost the Entente powers $33,485.48 to kill a serviceman fighting for the Central Powers, it cost the Central Powers just $11,344.77 to kill a serviceman fighting for the Entente...

...The consequent sense of the point-lessness of further effort rotted the resolution of the German soldier to do his duty," Keegan says...

...But the Germans' nerve was smashed, and had the Armistice not been sought when it was, the Kaiser's army might well have simply dissolved...

...The last great German offensive, in the spring of 1918, penetrated deep into the British military zone—where the ill-fed, badly shod German troops got a look at the Allies' colossal mountains of food, clothing, boots, and ammunition...

...Britain financed the war by dissolving its overseas investments...

...When the heir to the Habsburg throne announced he would visit Sarajevo, the capital of Bosnia, in June 1914, five young Bosnian Serbs decided to murder him...

...War in the Balkans was the first horror we passed on our way into the century, and it is the final horror we are passing on our way out...

...Fischer, Ferguson says, was talking about Germany's aims in 1916...

...Once they reached the French border, the truckless German troops would have to get off their trains and walk...

...But the Austrians hesitated for four weeks, during which the great powers of Europe became convinced their interests were implicated in the Serbian-Austrian confrontation...

...The Pity of War is a fascinating volume, bristling with interesting ideas...

...Most impressively, it is a miracle of concision, compressing problems that have consumed entire books into two or three crystalline paragraphs...

...It did not stir the profound emotions of the Civil War or the Revolution, and it lacked the moral clarity of World War II...

...A dictatorship fell in Berlin, undoing 1933...

...harder too about the observation, which he does not make, that Britain spent only slightly more to defeat the Kaiser than the United States spent to win World War II—an expenditure that did not prevent the United States from dominating the twentieth...

...A country, no matter how rich, ceases to be great when it loses the heart to protect itself in a world of dangerous states...

...The United States tried for three years to preserve its neutrality, but was at last drawn in as well, declaring war on Germany in April 1917...

...Austria had it...

...In the end, the United States ended up lending Germany the money, which only made the already ramshackle financial structure of the 1920s more rickety still...

...The Germans proceeded anyway...

...And here—in time for the eighty-fifth anniversary of the assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand David Frum is a contributing editor to THE WEEKLY STANDARD...

...Bulgaria the German...

...The Red Army withdrew from central Europe, rescinding 1945...

...Had Britain stood aside—even for a matter of weeks—continental Europe could therefore have been transformed into something not wholly unlike the European Union we know today—but without the massive contraction in British overseas power entailed by the fighting of two world wars....It would have been infinitely preferable if Germany could have achieved its hegemonic position on the continent without two world wars...

...The country that Ferguson envisages paying reparations was thus not a stable, prosperous Germany, quietly accumulating trade surpluses in a free trade world...

...Had Britain in 1919 been what it was in 1859—the world's most productive economy—all the foreign assets spent to win the war would speedily have been replaced...

...Cost was the crucial variable of the war...

...He argues that Germany did not emerge from the war economically broken: Its internal war debt and its external reparations debt amounted to 160 percent of its gross domestic product in 1921, less than Britain's (165 percent) and substantially less than Britain's after the 1815 defeat of Napoleon (which Ferguson believes to have been close to 200 percent...

...The technical term for such countries is "prey...

...So were the lifesaving technologies that reduced casualties in the West during World War II: blood transfusions, antibiotics, and perhaps most important, trucks that could move the wounded rapidly to a field hospital...

...By 1921—two years before the famous German hyperinflation of the 1920s began— Germany had already inflated away most of its internal debt...

...Three percent of national income is substantial, but hardly crushing: It's roughly equivalent to America's post-Cold War defense budget...