Europe's Last Summer by David Fromkin

Europe's Last Summer by David Fromkin

Popular belief that the First World War had been pointless started in the 1930s, and became widespread during the cold war. By the early 1960s, the musical romp Oh! What a Lovely War was having a field day satirising generals. Its anti-Establishment jibes leached into many of the captions of A J P Taylor's 1963 book, The Illustrated History of the First World War.

A founder member of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, Taylor projected his own anxieties (about deterrents that did not deter, or catastrophes that came about through a combination of accident and technological momentum) on to the dimwitted statesmen of the railway age. In his perverse attempt to deny that great events have profound causes, Taylor wrote: “Nowhere was there conscious determination to provoke a war. Statesmen miscalculated. They used the instruments of bluff and threat which had proved effective on previous occasions. This time things went wrong. The deterrent on which they relied failed to deter; the statesmen became the prisoners of their own weapons. The great armies, accumulated to provide security and preserve the peace, carried the nations to war by their own weight.” Events unfolded, he argued, according to the iron logic of train timetables.

Meanwhile, the German historian Fritz Fischer was unsettling his countrymen with claims that Germany's leaders had willed a Balkan war between Austria-Hungary and Serbia, blithely risking its escalation not just into a continental conflict with France and Russia, but also, through the invasion of Belgium, into a global conflagration involving Britain and its far-flung dominions. Fischer then produced a huge study of German war aims, which he claimed had been agreed, along with the intention to go to war, as long ago as the December 1912 “war council” (this contention no longer enjoys favour). Whereas Taylor claimed that the Second World War, too, was the product of diplomatic miscalculation, Fischer argued forcefully that Germany had been responsible for both wars, the 1939-45 conflict merely being a continuation of its aggressive imperialism of 1914-18.

Since the 1960s, the Great War has generated acres of literature, inspired by the release of new archives and the unprecedented shadow it has cast over the rest of the 20th century. The dog days of an English summer seem a good time to consider two new but strikingly different additions to this literature.

David Fromkin's Europe's Last Summer is less the elegy promised by its title than a slightly frenetic brief for the prosecution. The accused are Austria-Hungary and Germany — the former bent on crushing Serbia, lest, like Piedmont and Prussia in the previous century, it become a magnet for nationalist aspirations that would destroy the Habsburg empire, the latter (meaning Germany's senior generals) bent on striking at the allies France and Russia before they achieved strategic superiority, even if it meant a war with Britain. Fromkin gives some excellent pen portraits of the principals, and uses quotations to deadly effect, as when the German kaiser, Wilhelm ...