Europe's Last Summer

EUROPE'S LAST SUMMER: Who Started the Great War in 1914? By David Fromkin. Knopf.

349 pp. $26.95

Almost as soon as the guns began to fire in that glorious, sunny August of 1914, the arguments started over who was to blame. After the armistice of 1918, the Commission on the Responsibility of the Authors of the War formally found Germany guilty. This verdict led to Article 231 of the Treaty of Versailles, the notorious “war guilt” clause that was used to justify the $32 billion in reparations that Germany was required (but proved unable) to pay.

The apparent unfairness of pillorying Germany inspired historians to reconsider the assignment of guilt. Perhaps the most universally satisfactory new judgment was that of the British historian A. J. P. Taylor, reinforced by the American Barbara Tuchman, who shifted some of the blame to the mechanics of mobilization. Germany planned to defeat France in six brisk weeks and then move its victorious troops by train to face the Russians. Once Russia began to mobilize against Austria, Germany had to invade France or else lose valuable time. This explanation neatly blamed the war on impersonal forces rather than individual statesmen or countries.

But the explanation didn’t hold up long. In the 1950s, Franz Fischer discovered archives overlooked by previous historians. His seminal book of 1966, Griff nach der Weltmacht (Bid for world power), showed that Kaiser Wilhelm’s generals wanted war, and quickly, before Russia’s headlong industrial growth made it too fearsome to fight. In the view of General Helmuth von Moltke, military chief of staff, this would be a defensive war forced upon Germany to preserve its position in Europe against the Slavic tide. His Austro-Hungarian counterpart, Conrad von Hoetzendorf, wanted war, and quickly, in order to preserve the empire against the siren lure independent Serbia exercised upon Slavic peoples ruled by Vienna. Fischer’s conclusions inspired a new generation of historians, who have modified but not demolished his thesis.

David Fromkin, whose A Peace to End All Peace (1989) is a splendid account of the way World War I led to the reshaping of the Middle East, with consequences we all suffer to this day, now claims to have resolved the continuing controversy over the Great War’s outbreak. Historians were looking for the origins of one war, he believes, when they should have been looking for the origins of two.

Germany’s Moltke wanted a war against Russia, to be waged as soon as the Kaiser’s army defeated France. To hold off the Russians while Germany fought the French, Moltke needed Hoetzendorf’s Austrian armies heading northeast. But Hoetzendorf wanted a war to crush Serbia, which re­quired his army to move south. Thus, Moltke and Hoetzendorf were allies who pursued wholly different strategic aims via incompatible war plans. To Fromkin, this dysfunctional alliance, in which each chief of staff tried to pull the wool over the other’s eyes, explains the speed with which Old Europe plunged into a war that became a collective act of suicide for its empires, its armies, and its pretensions to civilization.

Historians will doubtless take issue with elements of Fromkin’s case. He may go a little easy on the tsarist court, on British equivocation, and on the French high command. But they should also ponder the second and in some ways more profound argument he deploys in his conclusion. “The decision for war in 1914 was purposeful; and the war itself was not, as generations of historians have taught, meaningless,” Fromkin maintains. “On the contrary, it was fought to decide the essential questions in international politics: who would achieve mastery in Europe, and therefore in the world, and under the banners of what faith.” That is a far more pungent and arresting matter to ponder than yet another sift through the rumbling bones of blame.

—Martin Walker