Following the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo it took a mere six weeks for the diplomats of Europe’s Great Powers to plunge the continent into cataclysmic war. Austria-Hungary wanted Serbia, which was protected by Russia, which was in an entente cordiale with Great Britain and France. Germany was the ally of Austria-Hungary. For good measure, Turkey was the ally of Germany.
Simon Heffer straightforwardly follows the messaging and the meeting that resulted in catastrophe. There are no forces or movements here, but rather individuals trying to serve their nations’ best interests, and with generally good intentions all round. The road to hell.
Emphasis on the words and actions and characters of those directly involved, such as Edward Grey, the British foreign secretary, Prince Lichnowsky, the German ambassador to Britain, and Dayrell Crackanthorpe, the British minister in Belgrade, is carried on throughout the precise, occasionally sardonic Staring at God. As war breaks out, the narrative becomes more keenly focused on the exclusively British experience, and Heffer keeps a beady eye on every day that passes.
In between the ‘next mornings’ and ‘that nights’, and the breakfasts, lunches, dinners and walks in the woods, he finds space to fill the reader in on social, economic and cultural happenings and, indeed, the progress of the war itself. It is a mammothly complicated task, which is achieved with concision and fluency.
The cast of principal characters comprises no more than two dozen. The leads, naturally, are the prime ministers Asquith and Lloyd George. While Heffer is on the whole scrupulously objective, he is often cutting, unwilling to suffer gladly governments’ almost continuous folly. However his antipathy towards Lloyd George, who is presented throughout as unscrupulously ambitious, dishonest and manipulative, reveals the ineradicable bias of the high Tory Englishman that the author is known to be.
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