Lawrence Sondhaus,World War One: The Global Revolution

Reviewed by: John Gooch, University of Leeds, UK

Comparative histories of the First World War are still rare, which in itself makes Lawrence Sondhaus’s foray into this field welcome. A distinguished and prolific writer on the Austro-Hungarian navy and army, his starting point is the claim that most Anglophone historians of the war ‘have completely misunderstood Austria-Hungary and the dynamic between the Central Powers’, and as a result have ‘to some extent misunderstood the war’ (xiii). Readers familiar with the work of historians such as Norman Stone, Samuel R. Williamson and Holger H. Herwig may find it a trifle difficult to descry exactly where and what these misunderstandings are, but, in any case, the value of the book, both to undergraduates and to their teachers, lies rather in the vastness of its conspectus, as the author takes us from the mud of the Western Front via the ice and snow of the Julian Alps and the Carpathians to the sands of Mesopotamia and the deserts of South-West Africa, and many other places besides.

To start with, a compressed account of the origins of the war touches on some of the main analytical issues that must be addressed, such as roles played by the alliance system, militarism and the arms race, but neglects others: the Primat der Innenpolitik, for example, which formed the stuff of so much of the literature from the 1960s to the 1980s and beyond does not get a look-in here. The pursuit of the pithy summary judgement occasionally produces some rather odd statements, among them the claim that contemporary writers overlooked the longest section of Clausewitz’s On War on defensive war, which in my copy occupies one book out of eight. But neglect it they did. Pungency comes into its own in the account of the July crisis, and Professor Sondhaus knows exactly where he stands: Serbia ‘started World War I’ (59), and Russia’s general mobilization on 31 July 1914 ‘gave Germany the war it wanted’ (55), a war which ‘hardly began by accident’ (60). These and other zingy obiter dicta with which many, but no doubt not all, would agree, invite the undergraduate essay-setter simply to append the word ‘Discuss’.

What follows is a narration of the war which at least touches on every one of its many theatres. The approach to the military dimensions is predominantly strategic-operational with an admixture of politics and enough on the tactical developments to underpin an account which focuses rather more on the ‘what’ and the ‘how’ of the combat than the ‘why’. A pair of chapters on the Home Fronts summarize the current literature in a very digestible form, surgically dismantling a couple of long-established myths in the process – that in 1914 there was widespread popular enthusiasm for war, and that the war generated a social revolution that permanently changed gender relations. No matter how much you know about the First World War, your eye is sure to be caught by something unexpected or unsuspected among a plethora of statistics and details – such as that 31 per cent of American troops were illiterate in the English language, and that Andorra only ended hostilities with Imperial Germany in 1958. Occasionally, though, some of Professor Sondhaus’s declarations look more like ‘factoids’ than facts, particularly when he gets on to matters Italian. To describe the Italian premier Vittorio Orlando as ‘a … Sicilian Mafioso’ (355) is to say the least misleading, and to claim that at the end of 1915 200,000 Italian troops, or 20 per cent of the Italian armed forces, were ‘unaccounted for’ and most were ‘either wandering behind the front or trying to make their way home’ (155) is simply wrong in every respect.

After an exceptionally well handled summary of the Paris Peace Conference, Professor Sondhaus offers his thoughts on the multi-faceted legacy of the war, among them that during the war Germany inflicted far more damage on its opponents than it sustained, that Serbia arguably emerged as the biggest winner (the kind of paradox that A. J. P. Taylor would have revelled in), that Wilsonian principles are what Europe now lives by, and, perhaps most striking of all, that ‘In world historical terms, the end of the Islamic caliphate ranks as one of the most dramatic consequences of World War I beyond Europe’(492). His final conclusion is that the First World War, by de-sensitizing so many to the bloody violence of modern war, acted as a necessary prerequisite for the even greater carnage of the Second World War. Well, maybe – but Professor Sondhaus will need to write another book to convince us all of that.