The Guns Of August – Barbara Tuchman, 1962 ★★★½

The Best-Laid Plans

Barbara Tuchman didn’t quite catapult history books into events, but she moved that ball forward in a big way. For several decades her heavy tomes about medieval warfare and Chinese diplomacy were best-sellers people lugged to the beach.

None had the impact of The Guns Of August, her 1962 account of the first month of World War I. It won the next year’s non-fiction Pulitzer and achieved legend status during the Cuban Missile Crisis. President Kennedy was said to quote from it often, tasking staff to read it as war with Russia loomed.

A recurring theme throughout the book, implicit in its very title, is the danger of inflexible war footings: “The impetus of existing plans is always stronger than the impulse to change,” Tuchman explains.

Tuchman’s gift for developing such ideas while engaging readers comes across in an opening chapter devoted to the 1910 funeral of British King Edward VII. Here, for what will prove the last time, Europe’s crowned heads congregate in London to pay homage to a fellow ruler. Alive with humor and vivid detail, the chapter explicates core political issues running through the rest of the book while spotlighting a single personality whose outsized manner and hunger for glory will contribute to what happens next: Wilhelm II, the German Kaiser.

The funeral of Edward VII, May 20, 1910. Tuchman quotes Lord Esher, chairman of the British War Committee: "There never was such a break-up. All the old buoys which have marked the channel of our lives seem to have been swept away." Image from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Funeral_of_King_Edward_VII.

Wilhelm, whom Tuchman confusingly dubs “William,” can’t seem to help himself. He’s German, you know. “The other sovereigns are so much quieter,” observes Sir Edward Grey, British Foreign Secretary.

Latching on to big personalities and ascribing events to their wills was Tuchman’s thing. This is a trait of many popular historians that served her well, if more as writer than historian. Other historians dissect economic forces ruling all; Tuchman plumbs emotional undercurrents instead.

In this book, villains like Wilhelm and his fellow Germans do everything but twirl their outsized mustaches, while heroes like King Albert of Belgium wear a mantle of goodness unequivocally. Events themselves play out as if on Cinemascope. Carp about her interpretations all you will, but damn if it’s not easy to read:

Character is fate, the Greeks believed. A hundred years of German philosophy went into the making of this decision in which the seed of self-destruction lay embedded, waiting for its hour…What made the Schlieffen plan was not Clausewitz and the Battle of Cannae, but the body of accumulated egoism which suckled the German people and created a nation fed on “the desperate delusion of the will that deems itself absolute.”

The Schlieffen plan was Germany’s bold scheme to win a two-front war by knocking out France early and then focusing on its other continental adversary, Russia. The plan involved invading neutral Belgium, a feature rather than a bug in the minds of German leadership who wanted that newish nation anyway for access to the English Channel.

Another German villain in Tuchman's telling is army commander, Helmuth von Moltke. "Success alone justifies war!" she quotes him saying. Image from https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/heritage/profile-helmuth-von-moltke-1.1786628

Tuchman didn’t like Germans. She was Jewish and came of age while Germans murdered Jews in Europe, so I don’t blame her. It does color her writing, though. Not that Germany didn’t behave badly in August, 1914. Her atrocities against Belgium alone merit Tuchman’s censure. But a heavy hand does weigh down the scales.

The biggest drawback to Guns Of August is laid out clearly at the start, in a brief Author’s Note. There Tuchman explains her reasoning for leaving out the actions of a key player during the run-up to the war, Austria-Hungary:

“The inexhaustible problem of the Balkans divides itself naturally from the rest of the war. Moreover, operations on the Austrian front during the first thirty-one days were purely preliminary and did not reach a climax, with effect on the war as a whole…”

That’s not true. For one thing, Austria-Hungary did a lot of fighting in August, its setbacks and reprisals against the Serbs setting a tone for the rest of the war. More critical, by leaving Austria-Hungary out of her account, Tuchman saddles Germany with that much more blame. It was Austria-Hungary that kicked off the war with its bellicose ultimatum against Serbia after the murder of Archduke Franz Ferdinand. Austrian army chief-of-staff Franz Conrad von Hötzendorf’s imperial ambitions made mercurial Wilhelm II seem a teddy bear. But in Tuchman’s telling, blame for the start of World War I rests with Germany alone.

But that’s partly why Tuchman is such a great popular historian. Like Suetonius and Edward Gibbon, she wrote histories with an overarching thesis that excites and drives readers to either agree with her or not.

There is another, lesser flaw about The Guns Of August: Its abrupt ending. Tuchman winds things up, not in August 1914 but mid-September, with the First Battle of the Marne, which she sidesteps almost entirely in favor of a quick summary. Given all the retreating I felt myself witness from the French and British, I was primed for an equally full accounting of a miraculous comeback. It doesn’t come.

To bring needed troops to the front at the First Battle of the Marne, Paris's taxis were enlisted. Tuchman writes of the Paris garrison's commander, Joseph Gallieni: "It may be he had a great commander’s instinctive feel for his moment; it is more likely he felt France would not have another." Image from https://www.pinterest.com/pin/542613455088521143/.

Tuchman is otherwise brilliant here, laying out how Europe went mad in a clear, concise manner, with an eye for delivering the right line or pungent descriptive. “Belgian peasants trying to clear their fields of the dead after the armies passed by could be seen bending on their spades like pictures by Millet,” she writes after the initial Allied debacle.

Or this from a French witness after the Battle of Virton:

“Thousands of dead were still standing, supported as if by a flying buttress made of bodies lying in rows on top of each other in an ascending arc from the horizontal to an angle of 60 degrees.”

There was a lot of death in the first month of World War I, and a lot of stupidity. Guns Of August fills pages with both, yet cunning and bravery also get their due, as do other virtues. “In 1914 ‘glory’ was a word spoken without embarrassment, and honor a familiar concept that people believed in,” she writes.

King Albert and his Belgian subjects refuse an offer to play autobahn to the German war machine in exchange for a nebulous promise of getting their country back once France is conquered:

Belgium, where there occurred one of the rare appearances of the hero in history, was lifted above herself by the uncomplicated conscience of her King and, faced with the choice to acquiesce or resist, took less than three hours to make her decision, knowing it might be mortal.

It was. Its great fortresses around Liège were leveled by heavy German field cannons, medieval cities razed, and the remnants of its armed forces sent scurrying to France. But Tuchman notes Belgium’s sacrifice was not in vain; it gave the Allies a cause to fight for as things grew bleak, an example that gave steel to their spines.

The German 17-inch howitzer, known as "Big Bertha," was the largest artillery piece of its time. They were first used to reduce Belgian fortresses to rubble in 1914. Tuchman quotes one Belgian city official: "Hannibal’s elephants could not have astonished the Romans more!" Image from https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/40779082-the-guns-of-august 

There is an evenness to Tuchman’s treatment of the non-German aspects of the story, characters who draw scorn one moment and admiration the next. French Marshal Joseph Joffre maintains a blithe calm as his forces collapse and the Germans push through Paris. Vast chunks of France are lost. His generals complain how out-of-touch he is. “Victory he believed would come not out of the best plan but out of the strongest will and firmest confidence, and these, he had no doubt, were his,” Tuchman writes.

Whatever the cause for Joffre’s “impregnable confidence,” whether fortitude or, as Tuchman suggests, want of imagination, the end result brought needed stability when all else was falling apart.

Similarly, the story in the east involves great stupidity and much suffering. Two Russian armies are sent into East Prussia to pull German manpower away from the French. Supply lines are weak, troops ill-trained, Russian commanders inept. Worst of all, the Russians coordinate via open wireless, not even coded because they don’t carry codebooks. Germans intercept the signals, and plan accordingly.

“We had an ally, the enemy,” Tuchman quotes German colonel Max Hoffmann. “We knew all the enemy’s plans.”

The Russian retreat at Tannenberg. Tuchman writes of the Russians: "They entered the war without confidence and remained in it without faith." Image from http://strategyandtacticsmagazine.com/site/battle-of-tannenberg/

The Russians were destroyed at Tannenberg, a defeat so total the Russian commander Samsonov committed suicide in despair. Still, Tuchman notes even this costly folly was not without some merit to the Allied cause: Two German corps sent from the Western Front to meet the Russian invasion were removed from the line just in time for the First Battle of the Marne.

“Let us render to our Allies the homage that is their due, for one of the elements of our victory was their debacle,” Tuchman reports a French intelligence chief noting.

The Guns Of August is a fine book for those interested in the Great War who don’t know where to begin. If it brings notions to mind of trenches, mustard gas, and the Red Baron, be advised none turn up here. The story here is of delivering death the old-fashioned way, via bullet and shell.

I’m not an unalloyed Tuchman fan; her reductivist tendencies and progressive pleading put me off. But here, even when indulging herself, she brings together her gifts for clarity, eloquence and concision to deliver a 20^th century version of Homer’s siege of Troy. Proceed with caution, but by all means, proceed.