Why does Max Hastings have such a hatred for the British military?

One of the great problems for any historian writing of 1914 and the slide into conflict is that everyone knows the causes of the first world war and those of us who don’t still imagine that we do. It is clear that no historian can simply ignore the causes and get straight down to the fighting, but with the best will in the world it is hard not to feel like some poor Easyjet passenger, stranded on a Gatwick runway and sadly watching the precious take-off slot slipping further into the distance while the cabin crew go though the familiar old pre-flight safety instructions that they know perfectly well nobody is listening to.

Serbian ambition, the internal incoherence of the Hapsburg empire, the Kaiser, Alsace-Lorraine , the ‘first blank cheque’, the ‘second blank cheque,’ Pan-Slavism, Ulster, mobilisation, uncertainty over Britain’s intentions, fear of decadence, fear of Russia, fear of socialism — none of them can be any more dodged than can the emergency doors or the oxygen mask. But when half the world seems to be writing about what happened in 1914, or should have happened and didn’t, it is an uphill struggle to make it fresh or interesting. It is immensely to Max Hastings’s credit that he manages to dispose of it all as economically as he does; but this huge, compelling, argumentative bully of a book only really hits its stride when the fighting starts, and the full catastrophe that the ‘absurdly amateurish’ 19-year-old Gavrilo Princip unleashed with the assassination of the unloved and unlovable Archduke Franz Ferdinand begins to unfold.

‘A bullet does not go precisely where one wishes,’ was how an apologetic Princip explained away the unintended murder of Franz Ferdinand’s morganatic wife, Sophie; but Hastings will have no truck with the idea that a chapter of accidents brought about the war, or with any liberal, guilt-ridden guff about equal moral and political responsibility of the warring belligerents.