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.