The Great War and the brilliance of Barbara Tuchman
Why The Guns of August is one of the best books about World War 1
By DAVID MYTON
That great scholar of World War 1, Professor Margaret MacMillan, says it’s been estimated that to date 32,000 books in English have been published on the origins of the Great War. (See her excellent lecture on YouTube Choice or Accident: The Outbreak of World War 1).
In my opinion one of the greatest of these books is The Guns of August by Barbara Tuchman, who won the Pulitzer Prize for this stunning chronicle of the first 30 days of the war, first published in 1962.
Tuchman (pictured), formerly Barbara Wertheim, was born in New York in January 1912 to very well-connected and accomplished parents. She graduated with a degree in history and literature in 1933 and eventually found work as a journalist, which included time in Spain in 1937 reporting on the Civil War.
In 1939 she married Dr Lester Tuchman, had children, and in the late 1940s began writing histories in whatever spare time she had with her growing family.
Tuchman, who died in 1989 aged 77, was in my opinion an absolutely outstanding writer who was a very competent historian even though she had no advanced degree in the discipline - a fact sometimes used against her by several critics.
It should be noted too that at that time of the publication of The Guns of August there were very few women professional historians.
Tuchman possessed superb descriptive skills. She brings to life the world of the early 20th century and wonderfully depicts the characters that inhabit it; she is also on top of the politics, strategy and tactics, and helps us to understand the ambitions, hopes and fears of the major players as well as the rank and file.
In the words of Margaret MacMillan, The Guns of August reads like a novel but it was history and firmly based on evidence.
There’s nothing funny about war, but Tuchman teases out the humour where appropriate and is acute when it comes to explicating situational irony. The Guns of August is a rare genre, hard to pin down to one “type”.
However, what it isn’t is a military history of strategies, tactics and operations along the lines of, say, Basil Liddell Hart’s History Of The First World War, politics and policy such as Fritz Fischer’s Germany’s Aims In The First World War, contextualised within a large time frame such as James Joll’s Europe Since 1870 or a deep dive into the military, cultural and diplomatic-political context such as John Keegan’s The First World War.
The book, all 483 pages of it, begins on a May morning in 1910 with the “gorgeous spectacle” presented by nine kings riding in the funeral procession of Edward VII of England, clad in scarlet and blue and green and purple, with plumed helmets, gold braid, crimson sashes, “and jewelled orders flashing in the sun”.
Big Ben tolled nine o’clock as the cortege left the palace – “but on history’s clock it was sunset, and the sun of the old world was setting in a dying blaze of splendour never to be seen again”.
‘The future source of tragedy’
Also in the procession was Archduke Franz Ferdinand, “the future source of tragedy, tall, corpulent, and corseted with green plumes waving from his helmet…”
After the funeral is complete, and the dangerous internecine squabbles of the nations represented there are exposed, Britain’s Lord Esher is quoted: “All the old buoys which have marked the channel of our lives seem to have been swept away.”
A major player in this sweeping away is introduced in the second chapter and in one form another – the man, his plan, its variants – remains with us for the rest of the book. Enter the monocled, “cold and distant” Count Alfred von Schlieffen, the arch military planner (and Chief of the German General Staff from 1891 to 1906) schooled in Clausewitz’s precept: “The heart of France lies between Brussels and Paris.”
Annoying difficulty of Belgian neutrality
Although this path presented the “annoying difficulty” of Belgian neutrality Schlieffen determined not to let it stand in Germany’s way. If Germany was to fight a two-front war – Russia in the east, France in the west – the attack west must come through Belgium to finish off France quickly with an outflanking manoeuvre that avoided a frontal clash. Belgium, it was supposed, would not fight back or its sympathisers intervene.
Schlieffen retired in 1906 to be succeeded by General von Moltke, who made some adjustments to the plan and filled in details of troop numbers and movements and “with infinite care had attempted to provide for every contingency”.
The French, angrily brooding over defeat and the loss of Alsace and Lorraine in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71, believed it could defeat the Germans via its doctrine of the constant offensive bolstered by the elan of its troops and their fierceness and tenacity. But as Tuchman points out, nobody on the French side seemed to mention the need for materiel or firepower.
All this was to be tested. At 8.02am on August 4 the Germans began the invasion of Belgium with the same commitment to Bewegungskrieg (war of manoeuvre) which they were to implement again in the early years of World War 2 (when it was mis-named Blitzkrieg).
“On the same day in Paris,” Tuchman records, “French soldiers in red trousers and big-skirted dark blue coats, buttoned at the corners, chanted as they marched through the streets … Cavalry regiments of cuirassiers with glistening metal breastplates and long black tails hanging down from their helmets were conscious of no anachronism.”
Later Britain declared war on Germany. “Germans could not get over the perfidy of it,” writes Tuchman. “It was unbelievable that the English, having degenerated to the stage where suffragettes heckled the Prime Minister and defied the police, were going to fight.”
‘The lamps are going out all over Europe’
Meanwhile, Tuchman recalls, Britain’s Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey had observed the headlong rush to war in Europe and, standing in Whitehall one evening as the street lamps were being lit, made the remark that has since epitomised the hour: “The lamps are going out all over Europe; we shall not see them lit again in our lifetime.”
Tuchman is extraordinarily adept at delineating the numerous and often larger-than-life characters who populate the book such as France’s General Joseph Joffre who “looked like Santa Claus and gave an impression of benevolence and naïveté – two qualities not noticeably part of his character”; General Ferdinand Foch “De quoi s’agit-il? (What is the essence of the problem?); Sir John French, Commander-in-Chief of the British Expeditionary Force, “mercurial at best”; General Erich Ludendorff, “friendless and forbidding”; plus a whole cast of people who play leading or subsidiary roles.
Of particular interest to me is Tuchman’s depiction of the French General Joseph-Simon Gallieni who was appointed military governor of Paris at a time when it appeared the Germans would very soon occupy the city. That they never did was in large part due to his courage, steadfastness and organisational skills.
Taxi cab drivers ferry 6000 troops to the front
He also managed to marshal Paris’s taxi cab drivers to ferry some 6000 troops to the Marne front – a contribution that helped the allies stop the Germans, deny them of a crucial victory, and which ironically led to the trench warfare stalemate that dogged the next four years.
Tuchman reserves the highest praise for Joffre, without whom “no Allied line would have existed to bar the German path. It was his impregnable confidence during the tragic and terrible 12 days of retreat that prevented the French Armies from disintegrating into a shattered and fragmentary mass … the one thing France needed Joffre had. It is difficult to imagine any other man who could have brought the French armies out of retreat, in condition and position to fight again.”
This is but a small window into Tuchman’s masterly account of an epic time in European history. It is worth reading in full not just for her historian’s skills but also to savour the art of a master writer.
References
Barbara Tuchman, The Guns Of August, Penguin Books, London. First published by Macmillan Publishing Company 1962.
Margaret MacMillan, 2013 Hagey Lecture - Choice or Accident: The Outbreak of World War One
Margaret MacMillan, 'The Guns of August showed me how history could bring the past to life’ – The Guardian, August 3, 2014 https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/aug/03/guns-of-august-barbara-tuchman
For a deeper dive on the work of Barbara Tuchman check out my two podcasts
Why Barbara Tuchman’s The Guns Of August remains one of the greatest books about World War One
Barbara Tuchman and the art of history