Fred and Loathing on The Internet

Static in the Trenches, Motion in the Oceans

2025-Sep-21

Another one-volume history book to discuss. This time it is The First World War by John Keegan. He was a stuffy Oxford-type historian who published the book in 1998, well into the height of his academic career. His sixties. The shank of the historian’s career path. I imagine the most difficult part of writing this book was selecting which parts to put into four hundred pages to prove his point. This book comes to me by way of donation. I forgot the origin, but the paperback has been living among my personal collection for at least a few years now.

This author really likes to mention every name of the generals involved in all the combat encounters. He seems to have no trouble making a note of what the general was fighting on one date. That is something to expect when the book’s title mentions the war, rather than the causes or effects. This book was battle after battle, and general officer after general officer.

As far as recommendations, I would not recommend this as an introduction to World War I as an academic subject. That is, unless you really like a register of the movements of bogged-down infantry divisions by the hundreds. Just how the Lost Generation came to be lost is recorded blow by blow. A very military flavor of history. Down to reinforcing division numbers or capturing railheads to increase supply throughput.

I already knew the gist of WWI. I had some curiosity about subtopics with more precise granularity. I just did not know where to look. Why not another single-volume history to find something of interest? After 1914 ended in the book's pages, I should have known the rest of the book was going to be a chronicle of all the back-and-forth steps of the four years of failed infantry charges on the Western Front.

The book had an author’s name I thought I recognized and was sitting among my collection of unread but owned books for a few years now. I had to finish it, even if it took the dreary recitation of Franco-German-sounding battlegrounds. (Also, turns out I was thinking of a historian with the last name Kagan.) I do not regret reading what could be my third or fourth WWI book.

My curiosities for the war are in the aberrations between the eras of history that met together during that war. Not so much the war itself. World War II is definitely the bigger war of the two. Most people immediately go to WWII when doing any extracurricular studies. Trying to understand any reason about how or why WWII was prosecuted does not require reading up on what happened before the war. World war, that is. Or however people were calling the 1914–1918 war in 1939. (Or 1937 if you are strict about the “world” part in WWII.) I do think it’s important to know the rudiments of WWI so that WWII can be understood as more than just a four-year playground of some really cool stuff that fits well into a Hollywood movie or video game.

My quest to understand what happened in the First World War is similar to wanting to read the back issues of a favorite comic book. So that I can see the foreshadowing of the bigger story later on. Much like understanding the story of the Titans so that you can see what is different about the Olympians. WWI is not the main show, but a less produced and raw version of the ideas that would get polished in a later story arc. The provocative mini-series that got picked up for a full-blown season.

That war is somewhat of a historian’s war. One that is interesting because of what changes afterwards, rather than what was accomplished in the span of the war. WWI battles are rarely dynamic. The bulk of any fighting in this war is a few moments of infantry charges that are expected to suffer a chilling amount of casualties, followed by weeks, months, or even years of sitting around in trenches, with infantry charges breaking up the misery—offensive ones or defending from them. Oh, and I guess the artillery was worth mentioning. Read the Keegan book about how everything (cavalry, intelligence, etc.) worked OK, except when trying to support infantry charges.

Making a movie about WWI-style combat would either be boring or horrific. Anything that shows something in between those two extremes within a cinematic range of 90–120 minutes would be too far-fetched. Not only are the battles unfilmable, even reading about the battles is a slog. So much death. So many troop movements. So many regiments. All these ingredients and there are no decisive battles to be found. No strategy that gets a chance to move into “phase two.” Just trying to write a simplified happy story proves a challenge if the truth wants to be approached.

There may be a handful of set-piece battles that could make for a thrilling movie without need for writer’s embellishments in the Eastern Front of the First World War. The Kaiser’s Army fighting the Czar’s Army, or some other fight involving empires slugging it out with new Eastern European nations. As dynamic as the Eastern Front might have been on occasion, the Western Front is where most people think of when they imagine the First World War. Let alone some colonial squabble in Africa or the South Pacific. You know, the “world” part in world war.

Which is a little bit of a shame. It feels odd to want to defend a “war” itself. I do think World War One deserves more scholarly attention among the masses. Yeah. Why not?

Not only that, I think it is an era of history I feel is underserved in almost any media. I crave novelty, and watching anything set in WWII already puts me off. Hearing that the plot involves evading the Archduke’s secret police, on the other hand, adds to my interest. I enjoy seeing real-life anachronisms. That’s somewhat of an oxymoron. I still think the whole war was a ghastly meeting of two different centuries.

The historical aberrations in this era—the early twentieth century, when the First World War broke out—are the last gasps of nineteenth-century steam-powered European colonialism, and the first prototypes of the new types of -isms that were to replace God and Kingdom as the reasons to govern society. A war fought among old empires. Empires that went out into the world in the 19th century, took what they wanted by threat of force, brought it back to Europe, built stuff with the materials. Really fancy industrialized stuff. Stuff that the empires wanted to use against one another in a war in an effort to improve their ability to make a lot of stuff on an industrial scale with the materials being imported from the rest of the world. A beautiful system that had nowhere to go except toward a big war with a lot of industrialized weapons among the people building up a stockpile!

I try to aim these blog posts to roughly three pages of single-space words. Knowing that limit, it is safe to say there is not enough room to go any further to talk about the military-industrial complex or its origin in the First World War. This book was not coming close to examining just what are the underlying reasons for making a geopolitical crockpot that made WWI so unavoidable on a systemic level. This was not that kind of book. There were a few pages about the bickering between Austria and Serbia in the summer of 1914, and its Guns of August ripples. Nothing about Imperial Germany being a young and misunderstood latecomer to the 19th-century imperial game. Well, not that many words.

Well, to be honest, the book did make a lot of references to the Franco-Prussian War, or how it was referred to by the French and Germans after the war as the War of 1870. There was no direct replay of just what happened in the latter half of the 1800s, or how it played into the creation of Germany. That was an implicit backstory that was expected to be known by the audience. This book is likely catered to the military historian that wanted a historian’s answer to the question: “Just how could the generals have fought this war well?” How could the generals in each year of the war have known how to expertly combine their arms so that they could overcome the obvious obstacles that no other army had overcome either in the war?

What I did find enjoyable throughout the book was mention of just about anything besides the stalemates on the trench line on the Western Front. There was a lot else going on in the war. Well… not too much. Not like WWII, that had any possible story going on all over the world. World War I had a few notable sea battles, but localized to around the North Sea or the Mediterranean. There were a few non-European adventures in the war. No more than a handful. As much as you’d expect in one year of WWII.

Keegan does a decent job of addressing the global theaters. A not-so-decent job explaining the intelligence game that facilitated the information for the general to make informed mistakes. Then again, this book is a mere four hundred pages. That can only hold so much military history. Keegan went with the actual battles themselves, not the stuff in between. A lot of human intelligence and codebreaking gave the decision-makers of the war plenty of information.

How he characterized the zest of the naval officers getting their chance to try out their untested industrialized weapons of war was the breath of fresh air among the tales of the battle lines in France. Unlike their counterparts on land, the admirals’ pre-war ideas of how the battle would go about actually came true. Their plans made it not only to “phase two,” but to completion on several occasions. There was no intractable problem that both sides could not solve like the armies had with the “machine gun” or “barbed wire.”

Say what you want about how drab the fighting could be along the Rhine. The naval fighting was textbook cases of battleships duking it out. Really the only time they got a chance to shine. There was a lot of national expenditure in those babies. Decades of building bigger and bigger ships. Ships that hardly got a chance to get used. World War One really gave the imperial navies a chance to do more than just watch their playable units get obliterated for no strategic gain.

Pardon the distancing language I used to describe the relationship between the commanders and their fighting men. Sometimes that is just how the decision-making comes off in the annals of this war. “Lions led by donkeys” is the lamentation I have heard before. Keegan tries to make the case that it is an unfair assessment of all those named generals in his book.

Keegan posits that the big problem among the leaders conducting the land battles of World War One was the lack of immediate intelligence available to the officers about what was happening in the battle once the execution of their pre-ordained orders had begun. If the circumstances changed, there was little to no chance of a timely response to changes to the situation.

Generals could not see what was happening until it was too late. They were usually too late to send a message that could change the orders to any effect. Too late to even know if a whole unit was annihilated. I do not remember if the author came out and said what the optimal plan was to overcome the circumstances that made infantry movement so dangerous. The Germans had Operation Michael, and the Allies had tanks. Both could work.

Even if either of those plans could work, everybody was exhausted by 1917. There were no players on the board that had armies that could use the stormtrooper idea for infantry breakthroughs or to properly support a tank charge. More importantly, there were just not enough bodies to continue business as usual. The generals had almost four years of throwing infantry at one another and hoping for reports of good outcomes every time they did the same thing. The entry of a whole bunch of American doughboys to just absorb losses ended the war.

It’s too easy to find fault with the generals of the First World War. Whole industries of military history are built on that question alone. I’m no historian. I’m just some guy who reads the published works of academic historians. I wonder if there is a historian who thinks the best idea for World War I after 1914 is to batten down the hatches, chill out, and just wait until this whole thing blows over. Something other than keep figuring out how to write the compile script for loading a successful breakthrough of the battle lines on the Western Front.