The First World War
by John Keegan

List Price: $17.00
Our Price: $8.74
You Save: $8.26 (49%)
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Buy Used: from $2.90 (click here)
Category: Book
See more book details and other editions

Book Summary Information

Book Reviews of The First World War

Book Review: Confused unedited review of documents - not a history
Summary: 1 Stars

An example of the result is his section on the horrible and heroic Battle of the Marne, described so movingly by Barbara Tuchman in "The Guns of August". Keegan reduces it to a series of maneuvers and transfers of divisions from place to place. Appallingly Keegan omits any description of the battle - of hundreds of thousands of French soldiers' desperate and bloody struggle to save their country.

Keegan naively and uncritically swallows whole the German General Staff's excuses for their army's retreat after its defeat at the Marne. If one reads only Keegan's account, one would have no notion that there had been much fighting and dying, only that the German 1st Army had unaccountably gotten out of position. Keegan would have us believe that the German Army gave up its war plan, and Germany its hope of victory, because of a bad field position.

Had Keegan applied any critical thought at all, it would have been obvious from his own earlier chapters, that that could not have been the case. Keegan's lack of critical thought betrays him into such self-contradiction over and over, occasionally on the same page.

His absorption in staff documents leaves the reader repeatedly at the end of long passages full of maneuver and counter-maneuver, with little mention of the actual fighting. Incongruously he concludes each such narrative with a summary of the staggering, and from Keegan's description, inexplicable, numbers of the dead and wounded.

The reader's confusion is added to Keegan's own by the fewness and poor quality of the maps provided. Keegan's narrative involves dozens of place names not shown on any of his maps. For examples, it would take an erudite reader indeed to know the course of the river Sambre or the location of Ivangorod, without either being named on any of the few maps though mentioned repeatedly.

A similar example is Keegan's notion of the origins of trench warfare. First he tells us that the British Army learned trench warfare from the Boers during the Boer War and introduced it to the Western Front. Later we learn that the Russian army had learned the importance of digging trenches during the Russo-Japanese War and had brought it to the Eastern Front. Keegan assures us that the Turks were proficient in digging in to fortify their lines. And he mentions that the Germans surprised the Allies on the Western Front with the strength of the entrenchments to which they had retreated after the Battle of the Marne.

Keegan appears to be uncritically retelling uninformed soldier's scuttlebutt, oblivious to its contradictions. It makes one wonder if he even read his own manuscript.

I read this because of the glowing back cover one-line raves from the Boston Globe, the Wall Street Journal, and so on. Now I doubt their reviewers actually read this thing any more than Keegan did. The other reason was that Tuchman's "The Guns of August" was so good that I was looking for a decent one-volume history of the rest of the World War. I am still looking.

Summary of The First World War

Keegan never tries to ram his learning down your throat. Where other authors have struggled to explain how Britain could ever allow itself to be dragged into such a war in 1914, Keegan keeps his account practical. The level of communications that we enjoy today just didn't exist then, and so it was much harder to keep track of what was going on. By the time a message had finally reached the person in question, the situation may have changed out of all recognition. Keegan applies this same "cock-up" theory of history to the rest of the war, principally the three great disasters at Gallipoli, the Somme, and Passchendaele. The generals didn't send all those troops to their deaths deliberately, Keegan argues; they did it out of incompetence and ineptitude, and because they had no idea of what was actually going on at the front.

While The First World War is not afraid to point the finger at those generals who deserve it, even Keegan has to admit he doesn't have all the answers. If it all seems so obviously futile and such a massive waste of life now, he asks, how could it have seemed worthwhile back then? Why did so many people carry on, knowing they would die? Why, indeed. --John Crace, Amazon.co.uk

World War I Books

• Subjects > History > Military > World War I