Amazon Guest Review of “Catastrophe 1914” by Max Hastings
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By Scott Anderson
Scott Anderson Author of Lawrence in Arabia: War, Deceit,
Imperial Folly and the Making of the Modern Middle East, Scott
Anderson is a veteran war correspondent who has reported from
Lebanon, Israel, Egypt, Northern Ireland, Chechnya, Sudan,
Bosnia, El Salvador and many other strife-torn countries. A
contributing writer to the New York Times Magazine, his work has
also appeared in Vanity Fair, Esquire, Harper's and Outside. He
is also the author of novels Moonlight Hotel and Triage and of
non-fiction books The Man Who Tried to Save the World and The 4
O'Clock Murders, and co-author of War Zones and Inside The League
with his brother Jon Lee Anderson.
To truly understand the grim march of twentieth century history,
one must start with World War I – and to truly understand that
horror show, one must look at its cataclysmic first few months.
It was during this time that Europe saw sweeping
offensives, great pitched battles, and such staggering
body-counts that the powers turned to the stagnation of trench
warfare almost as a matter of national survival. This is the
period British historian Max Hastings sets out to examine in
Catastrophe, and the result is nothing short of a masterpiece.
The power of this book operates on several levels. Due to the
political and complexity of World War I – as well as,
perhaps, a certain nationalistic chauvinism – most histories of
it tend to be decidedly local; a reader might learn a great deal
about the battle of the Somme, for instance, but virtually
nothing about what was occurring at the same time elsewhere. By
deftly moving from one battlefront to the other, Hastings is able
to create a mosaic of the carnage visited upon Europe in the
opening days of the war, and to show how those fronts were
interconnected. Certainly no other general World War I history
that I’ve read gives the commensurate attention to the slaughters
that occurred on the Serbian and Galician battlefronts in 1914
that Hastings provides here.
To accomplish this, he has wisely avoided that tendency so
common among historians - barraging the reader with a
blizzard of commanders’ names and regimental designations – that
can make reading about combat such an ironically-dull task.
Instead, by bringing us the voices of the young men from all
sides caught in the maws of these battles, we not only get a
visceral sense of what it looked and sounded and smelled like,
but an appreciation for the commonality of the horror befalling
them. Those wanting a , blow-by-blow account of the
Russian disasters at Tannenberg and Masurian Lakes, for example,
will have to look elsewhere – Hastings dispenses with these
twinned battles in a mere dozen pages – but for everyone else,
the description of ordinary Russians slowly dawning to the
realization that they are doomed is both wrenching and
unforgettable.
Perhaps most remarkable, given his focus on the personal and the
small, telling detail, Hastings’ voice also carries the mantle of
authority; very early on, the reader realizes the author has done
the heavy spadework of examining the myriad political and
controversies of the period, and come to a studied
conclusion. Chief among these is the enduring debate over who
was most responsible for starting the war, and in recent years a
whole spate of revisionist histories have sought to redirect
blame toward Britain or France or – most improbably - Russia.
While Hastings is ultimately dismissive of these alternate
theories (it really was the Germans’ and Austro-Hungarians’
fault), he does so decorously and only after entertaining the
revisionisms long enough to show their contradictions.
Similarly, the battlefield decisions of Sir John French, the
first British field marshal of the war, have been argued over for
nearly a century now, but it’s very hard to see what needs to be
added to Hastings’ elegant comment that French’s conduct, “in the
field was little more egregious than that of his counterparts of
the other European armies.”
In contemplating this project, it surely crossed Hastings’ mind
that his book would inevitably be judged against another work
that covers almost precisely the same time period, Barbara
Tuchman’s 1962 classic, The s of August. With Catastrophe,
that period now has two classics.
- Used Book in Good Condition.