Volume 2, Number 7 · May 14, 1964
Goodbye to All That
By Geoffrey Barraclough
Illustrated History of the First World War
by A.J.P. Taylor
Putnam, 224 pp., $6.95
The Strategy of Victory, 1914-1918: The Life and Times of the Master Strategist of World War I, Field Marshal Sir William Robertson
by Victor Bonham-Carter
Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 417 pp., $6.00
Ordeal of Victory
by John Terraine
Lippincott, 508 pp., $6.95
The First World War
by General Richard Thoumin, edited and translated by Martin Kieffer
Putnam, 544 pp., $6.95
Armageddon: 1918
by Cyril Falls
Lippincott, 200 pp., $3.95
From a distance of fifty years it is more obvious than ever that the First World War—far more than the Second—was the great turning-point of modern history. By 1918 the epoch which opened in 1815 was over; and what happened between 1919 and 1945 was little more than the completion of the process of erosion. Of course, the collapse of the old order was not simply the result of the war. From around 1905 there were plenty of signs that the bourgeois synthesis was disintegrating; and competent historians—such as Elie Halévy—have seen in the outbreak of war in 1914 the response of the old order seeking to forestall incipient social revolution. It was their miscalculation, their belief that a short, sharp thrust could restore their fortunes, that ushered in the great period of change.
Review, 2767 words
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