Hubris made the 20th century the bloodiest in history

Sir Alistair Horne, like that other great knight of military history, Sir Michael Howard, served in the Coldstream Guards during the second world war. According to Clausewitz (in Vom Kriege), his judgment will therefore be invested with insight denied to those who have never been shot over:

As long as we have no personal knowledge of war, we cannot conceive where those difficulties lie of which so much is said, and what that genius and those extraordinary mental powers required in a general have really to do. . . But if we have seen war, all becomes intelligible.

So it is disappointing to read the late Sir Martin Gilbert, quoted with apparent approval in the preliminaries: ‘I’m not a theoretical historian, seeking to guide the reader to a general conclusion. I’m quite content to be a narrative chronicler, a slave of the facts.’

Except, fortunately, Horne then ignores Gilbert’s prim admonition, to give us instead a nought-for-your-comfort reflection on war in the bloodiest century ever. Indeed the book, echoing Clausewitz, might simply have been called On Twentieth-Century War, but perhaps modern publishing demands a catchier title, and thus Hubris.

And hubris is indeed the consistent theme of an otherwise eclectic choice of wars, campaigns and battles, many of them relatively obscure, though they share the characteristic that the strategic impact of defeat is far greater than the immediate and tactical. Thus, for example, the battle of Nomonhan, at which an over-confident Japanese army was worsted by the Russians in Manchuria in 1939, meant that two years later Stalin could afford to withdraw troops from the Far East to defend Moscow, without which, Horne suggests, the city would probably have fallen to the Germans, which would have been the end of Stalin.