Louisville Courier-Journal, KY
Sept 2 2006
Book Review
The Great War and our world
Everything you need to know about WWI
By David Walton
Special to The Courier-Journal
Author G.J. Meyer, whose byline covers a long list of subjects and
publications, is more journalist than historian, and his A World
Undone: The Story of the Great War, 1914 to 1918 is a comprehensive
history aimed for the general reader. Its virtues are readability,
objectivity and command of narrative. It is one of probably an
unending series of books attempting to tell the whole story of World
War I in one book. But Meyer doesn’t try to have the last word. This
critic read his book recovering from shoulder cuff surgery, and while
one wouldn’t recommend the synergy of the experience for every
reader, it more than held a reader’s interest throughout. You finish
this book feeling you’ve learned everything anyone reasonably needs
to know about The Great War.
Every decade we learn anew the profound effects of that war’s
unfinished conflicts and problematic settlements — today in Iraq and
the Middle East. An understanding of the war, and especially of the
nationalistic and ethnic rivalries that fueled it, is essential to
understanding the modern world. Meyer organizes his book
chronologically, and accompanies each chapter with a short background
essay: on Europe’s ruling families and military commanders, on the
war’s principal weaponry, on corollary topics like the Turks’ murder
of their Armenian minority, on Lawrence of Arabia, on the war and
poetry.
The battle of Verdun is accompanied by a capsule history of the
military importance of the site. In theory, you could skip these
background sections, but you won’t. This is one of those books where
you read every page.
Meyer’s account has the very best qualities for this kind of
comprehensive approach: a gift for compression and an eye for the
telling detail. His theme is what this most terrible of wars,
stripped to its essentials, offers as its lessons: blunders and
endless bad luck and misjudgment on all sides, “blindness and loss
and perspective” and what Meyer calls “the strange dark poetry of The
Great War.”
Only a comprehensive account of “the killing machine” that claimed so
many million lives can convey the scale of tragedy the war became for
a whole society, in nation after nation.
Describing one fruitless action by British Gen. Douglas Haig in 1914,
one of the war’s few breakthroughs and one of its many missed
opportunities, Meyer writes:
“His gains included little beyond the ghost town of Neuve Chapelle.
He had lost 11,600 men, the Germans 8,600 — the numbers being mere
abstractions that, as always, veil thousands of stories of lives lost
and ruined.”
Why did the war go on so many months and years of stalemate, with no
gains, and millions dead and mutilated in its endless failed
offensives? The answer is succinct and requires only two sentences:
“None of the warring governments thought they could possibly accept a
settlement in which they did not win something that would justify all
the deaths. The war had become self-perpetuating and
self-justifying.”
David Walton is a writer and critic who lives in Pittsburgh.