Reading Through War #7: Testament of Youth - Vera Brittain

Vera Brittain (1893-1970) volunteered as a nurse during the First World War while her brother Edward and fiancé Roland served on the Western Front. Her memoir Testament of Youth covers the years before, during, and after the war. It's a powerful work on several levels. It captures the innocence and ideas of young people in England in the years leading to the conflict and the disillusionment in the years after which shaped the 20th Century. 

The most vivid sections in Testament of Youth are Brittain's descriptions of working in the hospitals. Victorian pieties disappeared, Brittain recalls having not even seen a naked man before nursing, but after a week the sight was common. All the talk of heroism and English manhood rang hollow when witnessing men being terrified of looking at their ghastly wounds or listening to a man screaming and writhing in extreme pain as he died slowly through the night. The bodily harm wrought by modern weaponry on such a mass scale was horrific. Soldiers in paralysis from the constant bombing, if not broken physically, they were mentally. Disease also spread like wildfire in the hospitals, the rotten smell of death and infection permeating the wards. 

Brittain's fiancé Roland was killed in December of 1915, and her brother Edward served on the Italian front and died in 1918. Brittain goes into detail on her grief, how it was handled by institutions and families. Her parents became shadows of their former selves. The sense of loss, something millions of families experienced during the First World War, leaves a deep sadness. 

Brittan had a literary background, her studies at Oxford were interrupted by the war but she returned later and earned her degree. Testament of Youth employs many different literary methods. Some sections read like a diary, while other parts are more journalistic. Brittain includes her own poetry and those of her friends. One gets a sense of events happening in real time. Historians have the privilege to shape narratives, but not if you are living through them. Making sense of the rush of events was challenging, Brittain explains how newspapers routinely downplayed the horrors at the front. 

Out of Brittain's tragic losses came a feminist and pacifist consciousness. She witnessed firsthand how institutions worked and acted against the interests of women. Nurses were put through long hours and poor living conditions, often at the mercy of insensitive doctors and head nurses. Nurses were expected to be cheerful and maintain and attractive appearance, they were to remain positive even in the grimmest of conditions. 

Reading Testament of Youth adds a personal dimension to the First World War when compared to history books like The Sleepwalkers or The Guns of August in which powerful men treat the world like a chessboard. Brittain gets to both the helplessness and grief people experienced - and their resilience. 

After the war Brittain became a writer and activist. 

Reading Through War #6: The Guns of August - Barbara Tuchman

The Guns of August is considered a classic of popular history. Sources confirm JFK admired the book and often spoke of it before and during the Cuban Missile Crisis. And he applied lessons from it during the crisis: Always allowing the other side options in a crisis and to not be pushed into decisions by overzealous military advisors. So, in that sense, The Guns of August was a rare work of history that also influenced history. 

The strongest part of the book is the first half, as Tuchman details the run up to the war. It reads like a historical pageant of blustering monarchs, skittish diplomats, and hardened generals. Tuchman excels at painting portraits of the major players, and the stresses they were under. One feels the weight of events as war becomes more likely. All the decades of war plans and diplomacy were coming to a head. 

Tuchman switched up the style for the book's second half, going to great lengths to describe the choreography of the opening military campaigns. Paragraph after paragraph describes the movements of vast armies, attacks and counterattacks, and frantic decision making. The effect is flattening. Unlike Tolstoy, whose philosophically acute accounts of military battles in War and Peace negating the power of leaders to shape history, Tuchman is more fascinated with those at the top making the decisions. Churchill, who was First Lord of the Admiralty, comes off as especially heroic. 

The opening campaigns were massive collisions of armies with unprecedented casualties. The scope of the battles becomes so large and complex, attempts to impose narratives on them presents challenges. Millions of lives were at stake, and thousands died violently or were severely maimed. I suppose this speaks to a limitation of military history, it can describe and even explain, but even the smoothest prose fails to balance the emotional and psychological cost of what is happening on the ground.

The Sleepwalkers by Christopher Clark focused more on systems and how the search for causes of why the war happened are often diffuse and defy logic. It goes back to the question of why rational people make irrational decisions. I think that's why The Guns of August loses some of its power once the focus shifts to war, it's harder to place order on those events through writing, the speed and complexity require something more than map rooms and blow by blow accounts. 

The irony is that 1914 ultimately ended in anti-climax. The war settled into stalemate and strategic deadlock after the desperate Battle of the Marne. Tuchman undoubtedly wrote a classic on the start of the First World War and the personalities involved, allowing history to come alive for many readers (including a President) - and that's no small feat. 

Reading Through War #5: The Sleepwalkers - Christopher Clark

The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914 by Cambridge historian Christopher Clark tackles the thorny question of how the Great War happened. Clark goes to great lengths to provide the perspectives of all the participants and avoids the blame game common in these discussions. Human agency is considered; there were many powerful personalities involved, but they were often nullified within the complex systems of the modern state. 

Traditionally, when the origins of the First World War are taught one goes to imperialism, nationalism, and militarism. Clark never denies the importance of these long-term causes, but he also avoids easy answers. If Barbara Tuchman's The Proud Tower analyzed the cultural symptoms that led to world war, The Sleepwalkers takes a more forensic approach.

The international situation from 1900-14 was fluid, alliances were shaky and could shift at any moment. Those in power had trouble making sense of all the variables. Germany had dreams of world empire but realized diplomatic isolation in Europe would paralyze them. Great Britain and Russia were tentative Allies but still competing for resources in Central Asia. Both Russia and Austria-Hungary struggled with the Balkans and the decline of the Ottoman Empire and managing the power vacuum. When national passions and geopolitical goals start to coalesce, war becomes more likely. 

Or take the case of Serbia. Emerging as one of the strongest powers in the Balkans, a violent coup in 1903 brought in a more liberal constitution, but civilian leaders lived in terror of inflaming rogue elements in the military. Instability in the Balkans threatened to draw in the Great Powers. While the Austria-Hungarian Empire was often portrayed as a dysfunctional state with too many internal problems, Clark argues the Hapsburg Empire worked well in administrating a diverse population with dozens of languages. The assassination of the Archduke brought the situation to a head, a moment that activated the alliance system.

Clark painstakingly follows the decisions made by each nation based on perceived interests. This is where The Sleepwalkers both clarifies and complicates things. The decision-making processes in every country were different, factors of personal diplomacy, agendas within bureaucracies, and false perceptions all enter the equation. All sides believed the conflict would be brief, famously over by Christmas. Either total victory or defeat, but stalemate was not considered likely. They sleepwalked into catastrophe.

For a forensic investigation of the diplomatic missteps that led to war, The Sleepwalkers will provide a detailed picture, although the descriptions of these systems within them can get laborious. The lack of humanity and psychological insight is the book's main weakness. Tuchman is stronger on getting the cultural temperature, larger powerful forces were in play. Taylor is more enthralled with the workings of systems and the power players within them.

I recall a history course and the Professor talking about pre-WWI aristocracy and their enthusiasm for massive hunts, sometimes slaughtering animals by the hundreds over the course of a day. Massive displays of arms and taxidermy in their estates. There was a fascination with violence and mass slaughter among those who started the war. Clark never interrogates such questions. 

The Sleepwalkers achieves its goal of explaining how Europe went to war but left this reader wanting on the why question. Gambling With Armageddon by Martin J. Sherwin suggested war was avoided during the Cuban Missile Crisis due to nothing more sheer luck, the systems were thwarted, but that was not the case in 1914. 

Christopher Clark. The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914. New York: Harper, 2012.

Reading Through War #4: The Proud Tower - Barbara Tuchman

The Proud Tower: A Portrait of the World Before the War, 1890-1914 by Barbara Tuchman provides a kaleidoscopic view of the West before the Great War, moving across politics, intellectual currents, and artistic life. The specter of 1914 hangs over the book, and it raises a familiar question: Was the rupture inevitable or a series of contingent decisions that might have gone differently? The tension between inevitability and human agency looms over the book. While Tuchman avoids any explicit answer on this question, one gets a sense from the book that the rapid pace of political, social, and technological change was all heading towards a massive shock. 

Structured as a collection of essays, The Proud Tower focuses on modernity and change. England's partition class was losing its grip, while France was polarized over the Dreyfuss Affair. Germany was flush with dreams of becoming a world power, Tuchman chooses composer Richard Strauss as its personification. America was also finding its way to world power after the 1898 Spanish-American War. Yet beneath all the empire building and technological leaps sat a deep unease. Anarchists wanted to remake society from top to bottom, while the Socialists promised a political program to remedy class inequality, but fractured over goals and method. 

Tuchman leans into atmosphere more than argument, texture in favor of interpretation. She paints mini portraits of many figures from English Prime Minister Arthur Balfour to Naval strategist Alfred Thayer Mahan. The litany of profiles can be a bit much and there's a tendency to substitute anecdote for biography. The sections on England are traditional political history focused on personalities, while an essay on the Hague falls into dry diplomatic history. Her chronicle of Strauss and Germany really shines as a portrait of artistic genius/megalomania and the restlessness of a nation careening towards catastrophe. 

What lingers most is Tuchman's sense of time and place. She allows the reader to live in the cultural climate and understand historical actors dealing with rapid change. The prose is refined even though it under explains at times. She does an admirable job of suggesting why some of the main players in Europe embarked on war in 1914, ensuring the reader will know the landscape when embarking on a deeper study.