The Guns of August

I added Barbara Tuchman's tome on the opening days of World War I to my reading list after I read my friend Clio's review. The Guns of August is as good as advertised, although depressing in ways that few books - even war books - can manage.

The crux of the book is the many failures - diplomatic and military - that ultimately led to four years of unrelenting bloodshed across Europe, and eventually the world. For a decade and a half France and Germany waited for the right moment to make war on one another; for years diplomats and generals alike had predicted the catalyst to would be "some damned foolish thing in the Baltics." And to think I always thought that the assassination of Franz Ferdinand was the cause of the war. Add this to the books that reveal the inadequacy of my education, at least in world history. (Of course, my ever-reasonable husband points out that it's not realistic - or even possible - to think one can learn every last detail of history.) But I digress.

Tuchman's prose is both spare and soaring; the war, she knows, is imbued with enough tragedy that she needed go all melodramatic on her readers. Again and again she captures the human details - the smell of half a million unbathed men marching hard in wool uniforms and August heat; the terror rained upon the Belgians by the Germans (somehow the horrors inflicted in 1914, when men still went to war on horseback and charged with another with fixed bayonets, seems more intimate - and therefore more terrifying - that even the horrors this same country would conjure 25 years later); the sacrifice of an entire army by the Russians to prove their commitment to the Allies. All so unthinkably awful.

For me, the entire 500 pages can be summed up in a single passage, two short, but heart-wrenching sentences: “At dawn the voice of the enemy’s cannon begins; 'the Germans salute the sun with their shells.' Through the incessant crash and thunder the French hear the brave scream of their own 75s.”