Still, for all the links Keegan skillfully draws between the
two wars, an Age (and a century) died in 1918. In both choice
of clothing and choice of transportation, the war began as an
engagement little different from the Napoleonic wars. For every
three men, there was one horse, and as Keegan points out, the
French at least had yet to modernize their uniforms:
The heavy calvary wore brass helmets with a long horsehair
plume, the light calvary frogged jackets and scarlet trousers;
some of the heavy calvary were burdened with breastplates unchanged
in pattern from Waterloo. The light calvary of the Armée
d'Afrique were dressed in sky-blue tunics, the Sphahis
in flowing red cloaks, the Zouaves in baggy red breeches and
Turkish waistcoats. Most conspicuous of all, because of their
numbers, were the infantry of the metropolitan army. Under long,
turned-back blue greatcoats, their legs were encased in madder-red
trousers tucked into calf-length boots. All was made of heavy
wool; the stifling weight of antique uniforms was to prove one
of the additional ordeals of combat in the sun-drenched autumn
of 1914.
The Belgian calvary was no better prepared for modern warfare:
they "still wore early nineteenth-century uniforms, crimson
trousers, fur busbies, [and] Polish lancer caps," and their
few machine guns were pulled by teams of dogs. (That wasn't the
limit of animals' roles in the war: communication on land, of
course, was executed largely by carrier pigeons.)
As Keegan argues, the failures of the first year's combat
were largely due to the generals' failure to comprehend and adapt
to technological changes that were happening before the
war began.
They had the wit to adapt the technologies ready to hand,
particularly that of Europe's many-branched rail network, to
their purposes. They had lacked the wit to perceive the importance
or potentialities of new technologies, among which the internal
combustion engine and wireless-telegraphy, as radio was then
called, would prove the most important; they had, indeed, lacked
altogether the wit to perceive the problems to which such new
technologies would be the solution.
Only the British, with their hard-won experiences in the Boer
War, were really prepared for the sort of dug-in fighting the
armies would see as the Germans advanced westward.
All that changed, of course, and quickly. As Keegan notes,
steel helmets were soon introduced into most armies, "the
first reversion to the use of armour since its disappearance
in the seventeenth century. The opening months of the First World
War marked the termination of two hundred years of a style of
infantry fighting which, with decreasing logic, taught that drill
and discipline was the best defence against missile weapons,
however much improved."
By the time it was all over, four years later, millions would
be dead, and three empires (the Ottoman, Russian and Austro-Hungarian)
would disappear. Chemical warfare would be introduced, as would
the use of tanks and bomb-carrying airplanes. And perhaps most
importantly, Keegan writes, "totalitarianism, a new word
for a system that rejected the liberalism and constitutionalism
which had inspired European politics since the eclipse of monarchy
in 1789, was almost everywhere on the rise."
All that remained, it would seem, was for a global war to
turn its attention to civilians in urban areas. And that, as
it turned out, would be a scant two decades' wait.
The
First World War is a heavily researched and painstakingly
complete book, meant to be read attentively by serious students
of military history. As such, it lacks the immediate, easily
digested appeal that made Stephen Ambrose's recent bestselling
Citizen Soldiers and D Day: June 4, 1944 so popular.
And the reason is quite simple. Ambrose's recent bestsellers
are personality-driven, Keegan's strategy- and tactics-driven.
Where Ambrose's subjects are foot soldiers and paratroopers with
individual names and stories, Keegan's subjects are more often
long-forgotten generals with plans and initiatives. Keegan largely
ignores matters of personality even among his planners, with
rare exception. (He tells us, for example, that Marshal Joseph
Joffre, who began the war as the chief of the French General
Staff, was "heavily overweight [and] devoted to the table
and allowed nothing, even at the height of the crisis in 1914,
to interrupt lunch.")
But Keegan is resoundingly successful at defining the reasons
the war was fought the way it was on a variety of fronts--from
the Germans' dogged execution of its Schlieffen plan in Western
Europe to the politically popular but ultimately costly Allied
campaign in the Dardanelles. And although as a British historian,
Keegan often favors the British side of the war, his final chapter
on the American presence and the power shift it helped bring
to the post-war world is quite strong. (The American army was
only the seventh largest in the world when it entered the First
World War, and it hadn't participated in large combat operations
since Lee surrendered to Grant fifty-one years earlier. By the
war's end, though, American ground forces numbered close to four
million--a critical buildup, given the Germans' inability to
replace its own troops at anywhere near that rate.)
In short, as an explanation of how a epoch-ending war was
waged, Keegan's The First World War is definitive.
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