The Great War, viewed from all sides

The historiography of the Great War is stupendous, the effects of the conflict being so far-reaching that even today historians are finding angles hitherto unexplored that they can make books out of; or, at the lower end of the scale, they are content to retell the old story in a different way. What we have been short of in the English canon is a view of the war not just from the other side, but from all sides: it was, as Colonel Repington termed it, ‘the first world war’, and not simply four years of carnage between the British and the Germans.

Jörn Leonhard’s epic and magnificent work — unquestionably, for me, the best single-volume history of the war I have ever read — tries, with some success, to embrace everything. He draws largely on secondary sources, but it is the marshalling of facts and materials that is so impressive, and his knack of not including anything that fails to interest.

Leonhard is professor of European history at the University of Freiburg, but his book — almost 1,100 pages including the best part of 200 pages of notes and appendices — goes beyond Europe, to the Middle East, Africa and to the far-flung outposts of the British, French and German empires, and never makes the mistake of seeing the war as a self-contained event. He gives a rigorous account of the background to the conflict that has only been bettered by Christopher Clark’s Sleepwalkers; and devotes his last chapter to the conflicts that rumbled on, in eastern Europe and elsewhere, after the armistice had been concluded and, indeed, after Versailles.

Leonhard understands that, for all the hecatombs of men who fought each other, this was a politicians’ war: and he leads us around the chancelleries of Europe and beyond, to America, once President Wilson takes his country into the conflict in April 1917.