Catastrophe: Europe Goes to War 1914 - Max Hastings

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difficulty in describing vast events that unfolded simultaneously on battlefields many hundreds of miles apart is to decide how to present them. I have chosen to address theatres in succession, accepting some injury to chronology. This means readers need to recall – for instance – that Tannenberg was fought even as the French and British armies were falling back to the Marne. But coherence seems best served by avoiding precipitate dashes from one front to another. As in some of my earlier books, I have striven to omit military detail, divisional and regimental numbers and suchlike. Human experience is what most readily engages the imagination of a twenty-first-century readership. But to understand the evolution of the early campaigns of World War I, it is essential to know that every commander dreaded ‘having his flank turned’, because the outer edges and rear of an army are its most vulnerable aspects. Much that happened to soldiers in the autumn of 1914, alike in France, Belgium, Galicia, East Prussia and Serbia, derived from the efforts of generals either to attack an open flank, or to escape becoming the victim of such a manoeuvre.

      Hew Strachan, in the first volume of his masterly history of World War I, addressed events in Africa and the Pacific, to remind us that this became indeed a global struggle. I decided that a similar canvas would burst through the frame of my own work. This is therefore a portrait of Europe’s tragedy, which heaven knows was vast and terrible enough. In the interests of clarity, I have imposed some arbitrary stylistic forms. St Petersburg changed its name to Petrograd on 19 August 1914, but I have retained throughout the old – and modern – name. Serbia was commonly spelt ‘Servia’ in contemporary newspapers and documents, but I have used the former, even in quotations. Hapsburg citizens and soldiers are here often described as Austrians rather than properly as Austro-Hungarians, save in a political context. After the first mention of an individual whose full name is ‘von’, as in von Kluck, the honorific is omitted. Place-names are standardised so that, for instance, Mulhouse loses its German designation as Mülhausen.

      Though I have written many books about warfare, and especially about the Second World War, this is my first full-length work about its forerunner. My own engagement with the period began in 1963, when as a callow school-leaver in my ‘gap year’, I was employed as an assistant researcher on BBC TV’s epic twenty-six part series The Great War at a salary of £10 a week, at least £9 more than I was worth. Programme writers included John Terraine, Correlli Barnett and Alistair Horne. I interviewed and corresponded with many veterans of the conflict, then merely entering old age, and explored both the published literature and archive documents. I embraced that youthful experience as one of the happiest and most rewarding of my life, and some of the fruits of my 1963–64 labours have proved useful for this book.

      My generation of students eagerly devoured Barbara Tuchman’s 1962 best-seller August 1914. It came as a shock, a few years later, to hear an academic historian dismiss her book as ‘hopelessly unscholarly’. It remains nonetheless a dazzling essay in narrative history, which retains the unembarrassed affection of many admirers, including myself, in whom it contributed significantly to stimulating a passion for the past. Those days will exercise an undying fascination for mankind: they witnessed the last fatal flourishes of the old crowned and cockaded Europe, followed by the birth of a terrible new world in arms.

      MAX HASTINGS

       Chilton Foliat, Berkshire

       June 2013

       1914 Chronology

28 June Archduke Franz Ferdinand assassinated in Sarajevo
23 July Austria-Hungary’s ultimatum delivered to Serbia
28 July Austria-Hungary declares war on Serbia
29 July Austrians bombard Belgrade
31 July Russia mobilises,fn1 German ultimatums dispatched to Paris and St Petersburg
1 August Germany and France mobilise
3 August Germany declares war on France
4 August Germany invades Belgium, Britain declares war on Germany
8 August French briefly occupy Mulhouse in Alsace
13 August Austrians invade Serbia, French launch major thrusts into Alsace and Lorraine
15 August First Russo-Austrian clashes in Galicia
16 August Last fort of Liège falls to the Germans
20 August Serbs inflict defeat on Austrians at Mount Cer
20 August Brussels falls
20 August French repulsed at Morhange
20 August Germans defeated at Gumbinnen in East Prussia
22 August France loses 27,000 men killed in one day of the abortive ‘Battles of the Frontiers’
21–23 August Battle of Charleroi
23 August British Expeditionary Force fights first action at Mons
24–29 August Battle of Tannenberg
26 August BEF fights at Le Cateau
28 August Battle of Heligoland Bight
29 August Battle of Guise
2 September Austrian fortress of Lemberg falls to the Russians
6 September France launches Marne counter-offensive
7 September Austrians renew invasion of Serbia
9 September Germans begin retreat to the Aisne
9 September Battle of the Masurian Lakes
23 September Japan declares war on Germany
9 October Antwerp falls

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