I was one of those boys transfixed by the idea of War, though I'd say in my defence that I grew up in a culture in which the aftertug of The War, as the Second World War was usually referred to, was strong and still personal for many people- and the ongoing process of mythification of those six years into a backdrop for all our examinations and fantasies about the extremes of human existence was well underway.
As was of course the WW1 narrative of Brave Tommies flung before the guns, working-class stoicism in the face of cruel and incompetent disregard from the ruling classes, and of young men living and dying in a world of mud and barbed wire. Young English men of course. Nonetheless the media profile, so to speak, of the earlier conflict was far less complex and ubiquitous and I think I was drawn to the narrative of this subterranean fight that somehow birthed the later world of Hitler and Churchill, the blitz and the holocaust.
Twenty-five years of reading later I still can't get it off my mind. The more I learn about it the more it seems like the whistle that blew on everything that came subsequently, a genuine inflection point in the history of the world in that it truly might not have happened, and had it not it's fairly hard to argue that the rest of the history of the century would have borne more than a passing resemblance to what in fact happened. You can argue it, just not in my opinion very convinvcingly.
So it is strange to be reading a The Great War by Marc Ferro, scion of the annalistes, on the topic. The Annales school
'relegated the sensational to the sidelines and was reluctant to give a simple accounting of events, but strived on the contrary to pose and solve problems and, neglecting surface disturbances, to observe the long and medium-term evolution of economy, society and civilisation' http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annales_SchoolThe First Battle of the Marne, fought over a week at the beginning of September 1914 would seem to put the lie to the essential annaliste standpoint that 'surface' events have no fundamantal imporatance as opposed to the long-durée socio-historical evolution of the 'mentalité' of the people- and of course that individuals and individual decisions can have even less bearing on, well, anything.
While Ferro does look at the popular culture of the time as a explanation of how it was that the rulers of Europe could draw on so many enthusiastically patriotic volunteers, once the war gets going we learn that Joffre's (the French generalisimo) strategic intelligence and calm leadership and equivalent failures on the German side were decisive. The geographic realities of conflict are of course highlighted, in that the battle took place just within a radius whereby railway networks based on spoke emanating from Paris were an advantage rather than a hinderance- but once again, Joffre ran an actuaries' war, keeping data on railway capacities and armaments supplies on hand at all times, and choosing, as far as he could, when and where to act accordingly.
I picked up this book simply from the desire to read a French historian on the period. Naturally, British writers tend to focus on the British experience (or to move far away from the familiar Western Front) and I wanted to see things from the point of view of the country that, after all the war in the west was really conducted by and for. It only coincidentally developed into a chance to examine further the precepts of a school of historiography that can seem to hold stubbornly to an intransigent insistence on one interpretation of the role of the historian and of history- one which is in my opinion, as is demonstrated by this book, both unproveable and unsustainable in the final analysis.
