Abstract
The use of railways in wartime is a subject that is rarely investigated by historians, and it seems that the reasons for this are largely structural. The study of railways in general sits within the discipline of transport history. Meanwhile, their counterparts in the war and society school of military history have focussed on the experience of individual soldiers. On the other hand, the operational school of military history has focused its efforts on battles and campaigns, largely ignoring logistics and transport as areas of study. This leaves the analysis of railways outside the mainstream of historical enquiry of both transport and military history; its study is left to a small band of historians interested in military logistics and to some economists.
This two-volume set, Railways in the First World War, is the result of a 2018 conference organised by the International Railway History Association, which brought together railway historians from across Europe. The volumes are divided into sections covering the pre-war period, the war in eastern and western Europe, military logistics, soldiers’ experiences, the issues of post-war reconstruction and reconfiguration, and finally the formation of the Union International des Chemin de Fer (International Union of Railways) in 1922. The theme of the conference was to explore transnational linkages severed by the war and then reformed after it, as illustrated by the pre-war Verein Deutscher Eisenbahnverwaltungen (Association of German Railway Administrations), which was replaced post-war by the Union International des Chemin de Fer. The books have 34 papers which cover a wide range of topics and seek to engage with a wide range of historical disciplines, from a general wartime history of French railways right through to a study on a single Russian railway line.
The number of books on the military use of railways is surprisingly small, starting with Pratt's work in 1916 and the German official history published in 1922. 1 Subsequent additions to the field have consisted almost entirely of popular histories. 2 Most academic studies have appeared within books on the wider subject of logistics, starting with van Creveld's seminal book in 1977, Brown's work in 1998 and Maginniss's study of 2020. 3 The fractured nature of the subject, spread across a number of disciplines, has limited interest, and so the publication of Railways in the First World War is an opportunity to make a real contribution to this important subject. What is more, it is noteworthy that many of the contributors to the books are already well known in this field.
The two volumes do a good job of covering a wide range of transport history topics, looking at organisational changes, traffic flows, evolution of operating practices, reconstruction of depots after the war, and many other subjects. It covers the human experience as well, looking at the repatriation of the dead, working conditions for railway officials, the transportation of prisoners of war, and the remembrance of railways after the conflict, in this case, after a railway accident. In addition, the set has a small number of papers on military operations and logistics using railways, particularly the transport of a German army from East Prussia in 1914. The coverage is not confined to combatant nations, with Spain used as an example of the large-scale disruption to traffic flows arising from the war, and Belgium for the experience of an occupied country where its railway equipment had to flee over the border into the French network.
However, the conference background of the books causes some issues as coverage of the major combatants is patchy, with just one paper on Great Britain (about three senior railway officials) and none on the United States. France has the best coverage with an exemplary paper summarising the work of the French railways during the war, besides other chapters. There is a whole clutch of papers on Germany, but an overview is lacking, while the coverage of Austro-Hungary is largely about Hungary, and the Italian front is ignored. The inclusion of a brief series of papers modelled on the French approach would have significantly increased the utility and scope of these works.
Given the ambitious aims of this two-volume work and the fact that it is a set of conference proceedings, the editors have done a good job in providing a wide range of topics which will appeal to transport and military historians, students of logistics and economists. It should certainly grace the bookshelves of any historian interested in the First World War. One can question the wisdom of making this a two-volume set when the combined page count is 530, and Routledge has produced other large single-volume books. However, it has certainly advanced the cause of railway history.
