Why was World War I called The Great War?

Obviously, The Guns of August, Barbara Tuchman, needs prominent big-upping on this thread. When you finish reading it, you know why starting this bloody, pointless, enormously futile war seemed like such a compelling idea to so many people at the time.

An avalanche of recent publications. I need to read Max Hastings' book. I finished this three months ago.

o man thx for that twitter rec. npr had a similar thing for 1963 last year that was great.

planning to whip through a bunch of WWI books this year and decided to start with 'guns of august.' it's pretty much as good as everyone says, and actually really surprisingly laugh-out-loud funny in places, but the endless parade of unfamiliar names in the first 50 pages or so made me dizzy. i'm kind of thinking i need to read up on my late 19th century/early 20th century european history before i tackle another WWI tome.

like, everyone always says WWI is where everything starts, and they're probably right, but it's also the end of a thousand small rivalries and lingering conflicts that no one ever talks about anymore. tuchman doesn't even get into the balkans et al.

one thing that really struck me was how resigned so many highers-up in the german gov't at least were to the inevitability of war, to the point where they were arguing over whether it would be better to have a war THIS year or NEXT year.

THE SCHLIEFEN PLAN

sounds like a '60s caper movie with a huge international cast

might reread 'against the day'. or maybe just think abt it a lot

THE SCHLIEFEN PLAN

by Robert Ludlum.

The thread I wanted! I'm in the thick of reading about the war too. I read The Sleepwalkers by Christopher Clark on the origins, which despite the elegance of Clark's book are just dizzyingly hard to wrap your head around. The Great War and Modern Memory by Paul Fussell is a great compendium of literary tid-bits about soldiers' experiences in the trenches.

Just started Meyer's A World Undone - seems like the best follow-up to Tuchman so far.

Link to Hardcore History: http://www.dancarlin.com/disp.php/hharchive

Lots of quotable stuff in Clark's book. Here's his final statement concerning the lead-up to the July crisis before moving on to the Sarajevo assassination, arguing that war was still not inevitable despite the macro-level dynamics bringing the major powers into collision:

The future was still open - just. For all the hardening of the fronts in both of Europe's armed camps, there were signs that the moment for a major confrontation might be passing. The Anglo-Russian alliance was under serious strain - it looked unlikely to survive the scheduled date for renewal in 1915. And there were even signs of a change of heart among the British policy-makers, who has recently been sampling the fruits of détente with Germany in the Balkans. It is far from obvious or certain that Poincaré could have sustained his security policy over the longer term. There were even tentative signs of an improvement in relations between Vienna and Belgrade, as agreements were sought and found on the exchange of political prisoners and the settlement of the Eastern Railway question. Above all, none of the European powers was at this point contemplating launching a war of aggression against its neighbours. They feared such an initiative on each other's part, and as the military preparedness of the Entente soared, there was talk among the military in Vienna and Berlin of a pre-emptive strike to break the deadlock, but pre-emptive war had not become policy. Nor had Vienna resolved to invade Servia unprovoked - an act that would have amounted to geopolitical suicide. The system still needed to be ignited from outside itself, by means of the trigger that the Russians and French had established on the Austro-Serbian frontier. Had Pasic's Serbian government pursued a policy aimed at domestic consolidation and nipped in the bud the irredentist movement that posed as great a threat to its own authority as it did to the peace of Europe, the boys might never have crossed the river Drina, a more clear-cut warning might have been given in good time to Vienna, the shots might never have been fired. The interlocking commitments that produced the catastrophic outcome of 1914 were not long-term features of the European system, but the consequence of short-term adjustments that were themselves evidence of how swiftly relations among the powers were evolving.

And had the trigger not been pulled, the future that became history in 1914 would have made way for a different future, one in which, conceivably, the Triple Entente might not have survived the resolution of the Balkan crisis and the Anglo-German détente might have hardened into something more substantial. Paradoxically, the plausibility of the second future helped to heighten the probability of the first - it was precisely in order to avoid abandonment by Russia and to secure the fullest possible measure of support that France stepped up the pressure on St. Petersburg. Had the fabric of the alliances seemed more dependable and enduring, the key decision-makers might have felt less under pressure to act as they did. Conversely the moments of détente that were so characteristic of the last years before the war had a paradoxical impact: by making a continental war appear to recede to the horizons of probability, they encouraged key decision-makers to underrate the risks attending their interventions. This is one reason why the danger of a conflict between the great alliance blocs appeared to be receding, just as the chain of events that would ultimately drag Europe into war got underway.

http://ejf.cside.ne.jp/review/diplomacy.jpg

Relatedly, just read The Strange Death of Liberal England by George Dangerfield. It's a 30s book, in the Lytton Strachey line of beautifully styled ironies & character portraits; covers 1910-14 - rapid collapse of a Liberal consensus through the Tory revolt over the Lords, Irish home rule & unionist agitation, rising union militancy, suffragism. Ends with the war changing everything, of course, but not really about the war. Tons of magnificent passages.

It is customary to think of that society as a doomed thing, calling in the traditional doomed manner " for madder music and for stronger wine," and plunged at last, with no time to say its prayers, into the horrors of war. The scene may even be given some of the qualities of a pre-Raphaelite canvas. The sky is massed with tall black clouds ; but one last shaft of sunlight, intolerably bright, picks out every detail of leaf and grass ; and in the midst of it those little figures go through their paces with the momentary precision of a dream. There is, too, a satisfying irony in this : the spectator knows what is going to happen, the actors do not; they are almost in the happy condition of OEdipus and Jocasta, before the news arrived which made the unhappy gentleman remove his eyes. And the conception is, above all, a convenient one. It is easier to think of Imperial England, beribboned and bestarred and splendid, living in majestic profusion up till the very moment of war. Such indeed was its appearance, the appearance of a somewhat decadent Empire and a careless democracy. But I do not think that its social history will be written on these terms.

I like how Henry James and Sigmund Freud had such oppositely characteristic reactions to the outbreak of war, James experiencing it as a shattering of naiveté, Freud as a swelling of libido.

The plunge of civilization into the abyss of blood and darkness by the wanton feat of those two infamous autocrats is a thing that so gives away the whole long age during which we had supposed the world to be, with whatever abatement, gradually bettering, that to have to take it all now for what the treacherous years were all the while really making for meaning is too tragic for any words.

For the first time in thirty years, I feel myself to be an Austrian, and feel like giving this not very hopeful empire another chance. All my libido is dedicated to Austria-Hungary.

*"making for and meaning"

are there any WWI vets left? at all?

no

there are <10 people born in the 19th century alive now

2 Sarah Knauss F 24 September 1880 30 December 1999 119 years, 97 days United States

lol gutted

can't help but think that living for another 367 days wasn't that big a deal for her

think u just played urself there bro

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Florence_Green

died in 2012

xp ?? 21st century began 1 Jan 2001

Relatedly, just read The Strange Death of Liberal England by George Dangerfield. It's a 30s book, in the Lytton Strachey line of beautifully styled ironies & character portraits; covers 1910-14 - rapid collapse of a Liberal consensus

Yes! I read it last summer. Beautiful. That era of English political life was a mystery.

Michael Gove's favourite book, apparently.

I second recommendation of The Sleepwalkers, though Clark is a Hapsburg scholar and is perhaps over-sympathetic towards the bumblers in Vienna. It did succeed in bringing home to me the centrality of events in the Balkans, and particularly Serbia, in the run-up to the apocalypse.

ha, the gove thing is why i read it - had a short piece on it commissioned after he mentioned it on monday.

Tuchman putting herself in The Guns of August, awesome

While she did not explicitly mention this in The Guns of August, Barbara Tuchman was a witness to one of the pivotal events of the book: the pursuit of the German battle cruiser Goeben and light cruiser Breslau. In her account of this pursuit she writes: "That morning [August 10, 1914] there arrived in Constantinople the small Italian passenger steamer which had witnessed the Gloucester's action against Goeben and Breslau. Among its passengers were the daughter, son-in-law and three grandchildren of the American ambassador Mr. Henry Morgenthau."[11] As she was a grandchild of Henry Morgenthau, one suspects that she is referring to herself. This is confirmed in her later book Practicing History,[12] in which she tells the story of her father, Maurice Wertheim, traveling from Constantinople to Jerusalem on August 29th, 1914, to deliver funds to the Jewish community there. Thus, at age two, Barbara Tuchman was a first-hand witness to the pursuit of Goeben and Breslau, which she documented 48 years later.

There seems to be a lack of WW1 films compared to WW2 films. Are there any films that realistically depict the horror of the WW1 battlefields?

I've heard great things about this book. Has anyone read it?

http://www.amazon.com/Paris-1919-Months-Changed-World-ebook/dp/B000XUBC7C/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1392658826&sr=8-1&keywords=1919

xp

you shd check out the 1930 film of All Quiet on the Western Front and Paths of Glory if you don't already know them. Gallipoli isn't on that level iirc but also worth watching.

I actually started reading Paris 1919 just yesterday. It's great so far, a refreshing change after Tuchman's intense descriptions of apocalyptic warfare. It's interesting reading about the headiness of the immediate post-war period, the armistice having come very abruptly while countries were still predicting at least another year of war, few people having thought ahead about what the future should look like but finding themselves suddenly in a position to radically reshape the world. So all sorts of optimistic projects were being debated simultaneously, from African unification to suffragism, with Bolshevism as an imminent threat spurring efforts on the part of capitalist countries to mollify their working classes. I'll be able to say more when I'm further in, but it's good so far.

Great read, that. The portrait of Wilson is hilarious (and chilling).

The credible threat of Bolshevism has, on the whole, been very good for raising the working conditions of the working class in capitalist countries.

Bolshevism and the Working Class
By Aimless 0 comments
2/17/2014
1:23 p.m.

The credible threat of Bolshevism has, on the whole, been very good for raising the working conditions of the working class in capitalist countries.

at the risk of channeling every ilxor's favorite finlander, idgi

Is the Guardian worse than it used to be?

happy birthday!

sort of

As it happens I'm reading Max Hastings' book.

how is that? read 'the guns of august' recently and wondering how it stacks up against the newer histories.

The up-to-the-minute accounts of the final hour August chats has never been better presented. Hastings' thesis: once Russia committed to Serbia's defense, there was no way to stop it. A-H wanted revenge (and territory), Germany willing to help.

i still can't quite handle the news that there are no WWI vets left, let alone the fact that WWII vets are dying out.

kinda serendipitous for me that i've been playing my first game of diplomacy these last couple weeks (supposedly JFK + kissinger's favorite game) and i got assigned Austria. germany is really the only country you can count on on the board. italy + turkey too tempted sitting on your border and you're ultimately going to have to deal with russia if you want to take a shot at winning the game. they actually have a name for an austrian german alliance in diplomacy: anschluss

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anschluss

yeah, it's anachronistic, but understandable

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/06/27/world/legacy-of-world-war-i.html

I'm also reading Richard Striner's Woodrow Wilson and World War I: A Burden Too Great to Bear, which makes the same case that Walter Karp did in the seventies but obscured in the wake of John Milton Cooper and A. Scott Bergg's solid recent bios: this messiah wanted to be the savior of the world from the beginning.

had it for years, but perhaps now i will get all the way through the war the infantry knew, which is a welcome antidote to general melchett-type histories

the answer to OP is that the war was really cool

so great