The Guns of August

The shock of the opening clash in August,1914, and the thirty days of battle which followed determined the future course of the First World War and the shape of nations in our time; its tense drama is the subject of this magnificent history.

The German, French, English, and Russian General Staffs had had their plans for war completed as early as ten years before hostilities began: Germany in- tended to invade France-not across their common border-but by a giant sweep through Belgium. England, through her military conversations, had committed her army to cooperation with the French Army. France, bolstered by her alliance with Russia and her "entente" with Britain, and dreaming of regaining Alsace and Lorraine, designed her strategy in terms solely of the offensive and the attaque brusquée. Russia planned a pincer invasion of East Prussia while the main Ger- man armies were involved in the West.

None of these plans allowed for the contingencies of the others, or recognized their own intrinsic errors. Yet for perhaps five years before the war began, each General Staff knew what the others would do; all was planned: the campaign, the number of divisions, the deployment of troops, the lines of transportation, the monstrous siege guns, the shine on cavalry sabers, everything down to the last button on the last infantryman's uniform.

In the summer of 1914, Europe was a heap of swords piled as delicately as jack- straws, and not one could be drawn out without upsetting the others. Still, national wills were prouder than they were wise, and the impetus and hopes contained in each nation's plans were stronger than the impulse to negotiate. Statesmen, field marshals, admirals, kings, and patriots believed what they wanted to believe or what they feared not to believe -and waited in profound ignorance for victory to reveal itself within a matter of weeks. They were to be undeceived. The holocaust of August was the prelude to four bitter years of deadlocked war that cost a generation of European lives.\

The bloody catalogue of the battles of August 1914 includes the almost mythic names of Liège, Tannenberg, Mons, the Battle of the Frontiers, and Charleroi; each name signifying also careers made or broken, opportunities grasped or missed, individual heroism or personal blindness. Here is Joffre indomitably rebuilding his shattered French armies, and Samsonov dying a suicide after the annihilation of the Russian 2nd Army, von Kluck stubbornly committing his fatal mistake, and Admiral Souchon choosing his desperate and fateful course for Constantinople. Here is the valor of Belgium personified in her hero king, and the ardor of Britain expressed in her Expeditionary Force. Mrs. Tuchman has made her book doubly exciting in the revelation of the human reasons for the disaster of war.