I'm going to go history-nerdy today. We're still living in the post-1918 world. For instance, it's a headline that President Obama isn't going to call the Armenian massacres a genocide on its 100th anniversary. It clearly was.
ISIS grew in a power vacuum that goes all the way back to the contradictory agreements imposed after the First World War. Meanwhile, Imperial Russia is trying to re-assert itself. It never totally collapsed in 1917. It just went to a new type of despotism.
The disastrous, lasting impact of "The Great War" on sub-Saharan Africa has never been fully appreciated in the West, either.
There's never been a better time to read up on the war in which the modern world broke the shell of its egg. The World War I centennial began last year. Predictably, there's been a flood of books. The most remarkable thing about this flood is how these books aren't all about the Battle of the Marne. The Western Front -- the opening clash, then mud and gas -- has always dominated accounts of the war in the English language and always will. But the rest of the world is getting a degree of attention in English that I've never seen before.
"The Fall of the Ottomans: The Great War in the Middle East" by Eugene Rogan is about as fine an primer on the birth of the modern Middle East and its politics as you're likely to find. There have been good books written on this part of the war before, but few as lucid and balanced.
On other fronts, I used to say the only thing more depressing than Russian fiction was Russian nonfiction. Then I read "A Mad Catastrophe: The Outbreak of World War One and the Collapse of the Hapsburg Empire." The author of that one is Geoffrey Wawro, who describes a multi-national Austria-Hungarian Empire that was more than dysfunctional. Schizophrenic would be a better term.
The Russians benefit greatly from the comparison in "Mad Catastrophe." Wawro's book is a tonic but not a cure to the Russian image of incompetence in the Great War. There is no cure. Czarist leadership was terrible, but the fact it was better than expected early in the war is notable and important. The full degree of how much the size and force of early Russian offensives caught the Germans and the Austrians off guard is described well in Wawro's book.
Speaking of Russians, leading English-speaking scholar Orlando Figes released "Revolutionary Russia, 1891-1991" in 2014. I'm still reading that one but quickly got through the sections involving World War I. It's superb but fast-paced. Figes overcompensates for his earlier exhaustiveness in "A People's Tragedy," but the slim book is still worthwhile. No one should challenge Figes conclusions on Russia lightly. Anyone who does should read "A People's Tragedy."
The dean of all World War I historians is Hew Strachan. There's no better short, one-volume account of this war as a whole than his "The First World War," which came out in 2005. As for the current, centennial crop of books, the best account of the war's opening is from the incomparable Max Hastings: "Catastrophe 1914: Europe Goes to War." That one also happens to make the needed corrections to the still-classic "The Guns of August" by Barbara Tuchman.
As a corrective to decades of scholarly neglect, it's hard to beat 2008's "World War I: The African Front" by Edward Paice. Much of the male population of eastern sub-Saharan Africa was -- to all intents and purposes -- enslaved as porters. There was no other way to carry the supplies of European-style armies there. The cost in lives was staggering.
As for America in the war, I'm going to make an strange recommendation: "A Higher Form of Killing" by Diana Preston. No other book I've read convinced me more that America wasn't able to stay out of the war. The book concerns the sinking of the Lusitania and America's reaction to it, along with the use of poison gas and bombing of cities by Zeppelins. These acts blighted America's view of Germany. Meanwhile, the crimes I mentioned before in Africa never got the same kind of attention. Armenia did, but the massacres there were by Germany's ally.
The world of 1914 needed to be broken. But the world of 1918 has never been put back together again in a newer, better form. It's past time to look at all the pieces.
Commentary on 04/25/2015