War sucks — always and everywhere

In 1999 I reviewed ‘The Pity Of War,’ Scot historian Niall Ferguson’s explanation of the madness, slaughter and impact of World War I.

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

August 29, 1999

Let’s start with the shocking conclusion of Niall Ferguson’s readable and provocative history book. World War I, he says -- after spending 462 pages explaining its origins, calculating its consequences and busting the commonly held myths that it was unavoidable or the result of war-crazed German militarists -- was not a tragedy.

Tragedies, in the Greek sense, are unavoidable events that humans are powerless to control.

World War I, the Oxford historian says, “was nothing less than the greatest error of modern history.”

What’s more, Ferguson argues that it was not those pushy Germans but the British who were in great part responsible for the magnitude of that error. It was Britain whose leaders went to war for all the wrong reasons -- not to defend little Belgium’s neutrality but out of fear of Germany’s rising economic and geopolitical power.

It was Britain that botched the fighting so badly, the Americans were eventually dragged into it. It was Britain, in short, that assured that a continental conflict started by Germany was transformed into a protracted world war -- Britain’s so-called “Great War.”

World War I is pretty much a “forgotten war” to Americans but is marked as the turning point of modern European history. Aside from the fact that it slaughtered an average of 6,046 a day for five years and drove artists to abandon the idea of continual human progress, it turned Western civilization upside down and rearranged the global balance of power.

In the process, it bankrupted the participants and “blew up the achievements of a century of economic advance,” Ferguson says. It also vastly expanded the powers and pockets of the participants’ central governments (including America’s) and all but snuffed out the 19th-century liberal values of individual freedom, limited government and free trade in favor of various strains of socialism and nationalism.

Ferguson says World War I made it virtually inevitable that Lenin and Hitler and their deadly totalitarianisms -- not to mention World War II -- would follow.

He contends that if Britain had stood aside even for a few weeks in August of 1914, Germany’s superior army would have probably quickly defeated France. That would have left Germany the No. 1 European power, Ferguson says, but so what?

“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.”

Engaging in such what-if games is fun, but it has drawn criticism from Ferguson’s fellow historians who also fault him for focusing too narrowly on Britain and Germany. Obviously, no one knows what would have become of 20th-century Europe and the world if Britain -- and therefore America -- had not joined the Continent’s war games.

But “The Pity of War” is more than a bunch of wild what-ifs. Ferguson set out in his book to answer 10 serious questions -- From “Was it inevitable?” and “Was the war really greeted with popular enthusiasm?” to “Did propaganda and the press keep the war going?” and “Why did men keep fighting when conditions in the trenches were so wretched?”

In supplying the answers, Ferguson reverses some widely held beliefs. For instance, militarism, imperialism, secret diplomacy and even the infamous “merchants of death” didn’t make World War I inevitable. And, despite what we learned in high school English class, he says the “overwhelming majority of the vast numbers of poems written during the war by combatants and noncombatants alike” were not antiwar but “patriotic ditties.”

Ferguson’s book is an easy read, full of the glories, horrors and insanities of war and riddled with bitter quotes from the likes of conscientious objector John Maynard Keynes of the British Treasury and Cpl. Adolf Hitler of the German army. Occasional bursts of info-overkill can be skimmed, plus there’s plenty of photos, casualty charts and financial tables to study.

Though not intended as such, “The Pity of War” is a depressing reminder of how criminally easy it was -- and still is -- for politicians to hurl their whole countries into the bloody hells of war for the stupidest or pettiest of reasons.

Ferguson, a Scot whose personal politics make him a 19th-century liberal, not a 20th-century one, is clearly annoyed that World War I cost his country so much blood and gold and clout; even in “victory,” it meant the beginning of Britain’s great decline. But as his book shows, World War I cost Europe -- and the rest of the world -- a lot more.