Catastrophe 1914

Max Hastings sets out to answer, in vivid detail, both how the First World War actually began and whether it was worth fighting once it did. He rejects the once-fashionable view, associated with Barbara Tuchman's classic The Guns of August, that the war emerged from an impersonal chain reaction nobody could control or be blamed for; instead, Hastings assigns clear, if not exclusive, responsibility to German and Austro-Hungarian leaders whose aggressive brinkmanship during the July 1914 crisis, following the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, pushed a manageable regional dispute into a continental catastrophe. He builds his case through granular reconstruction of decision-making in Vienna, Berlin, St. Petersburg, Paris, and London, alongside vivid, sometimes shocking accounts of the war's opening battles, when armies still marched into machine-gun fire in colorful parade uniforms rather than the mud and stalemate most readers associate with the war.

This matters because Hastings, unusually among historians of the war's origins, doesn't stop at analyzing causation; he mounts an explicit moral argument that defeating Wilhelmine Germany was necessary for the preservation of a freer Europe, pushing back firmly against the poetic tradition, especially strong in Britain, that treats the entire war as a senseless slaughter with no redeeming purpose. Readers should treat this moral argument as contested; many serious historians dispute both the degree of German culpability and Hastings's confidence that the war's staggering costs were clearly justified by its outcome.

Who should read it

Anyone wanting a vivid, opinionated narrative of 1914's diplomatic collapse and opening battles, rather than a dry causation debate, will find this compelling. Readers interested in questions of historical responsibility and the ethics of "necessary" wars will also find much to argue with here.

About the author

Max Hastings is a British journalist and military historian, former editor of the Daily Telegraph, who has written more than twenty books on twentieth-century warfare, including several acclaimed histories of the Second World War.