The Great War
Perspectives on the First World War
edited by Robert Cowley
Random House, 476 pp., $15.95
The Illusion of Victory
America in World War I
by Thomas Fleming
Basic, 543 pp., $30
Europe's Last Summer
Who Started the Great War in 1914?
by David Fromkin
Knopf, 336 pp., $26.95
A Storm in Flanders: The Ypres Salient, 1914-1918
Tragedy and Triumph on The Western Front
by Winston Groom
Atlantic Monthly, 272 pp., $27.50
The First World War
by Michael Howard
Oxford, 147 pp., $14.95
Castles of Steel
Britain, Germany, and the Winning of the Great War at Sea
by Robert K. Massie
Random House, 865 pp., $35
Paris 1919
Six Months that Changed the World
by Margaret MacMillan
Random House, 624 pp., $16.95
THE FIRST WORLD WAR isn't called the first modern war for nothing. It's a cliché to say World War I is the root of World War II, the Cold War, even the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but it's true. The fighting and the diplomacy, both prewar and postwar, of more recent conflicts are similar in many ways.
Even the current Iraq war bears some resemblance to World War I, although, yes, that stretches history a bit. But let's go ahead and stretch. The parallels begin with the decision to fight. War in 1914 and the invasion of Iraq in 2003 were the result of choices made by a tiny group, who were not responding to a public clamor for war. As the British historian Michael Howard notes in "The First World War," "it cannot be said that during the summer weeks of 1914, while the crisis was ripening toward
its bloody solution, the peoples of Europe in general were exercising any pressure on their governments to go to war, but neither did they try to restrain them." Once the war started, Europeans on both sides embraced it enthusiastically. Likewise in the United States last March, when President Bush ordered American forces to move into Iraq, the public was overwhelmingly supportive of the war.
At the outset, military expectations were the same then as now. All sides in 1914 forecast a short, successful war in which troops might be home for Christmas. That might actually have happened, at least for the Germans, if the Schlieffen Plan hadn't been diluted, thus allowing the French to halt the German advance short of Paris. Four years of trench warfare in western Europe followed. Like Schlieffen, General Tommy Franks had a plan to conquer the enemy quickly. It had eight moving parts, in contrast with only one for Schlieffen, but it produced victory in Iraq in three weeks.
Even the motive for war was similar for Germany and the United States: to prevent a fate worse than a short war. The Germans were worried that the military buildup in Russia would soon leave Germany in a vulnerable position. Besides, financial reasons had forced the Germans to slow their attempt to catch up with Great Britain's naval superiority. Bush, of course, had the reasonable fear that Saddam Hussein would slip weapons of mass destruction to terrorists targeting America or use them himself. In Bush's defense, he had other, equally legitimate grounds for going to war. The Germans didn't.
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