About book Catastrophe 1914: Europe Goes To War (2013)
When I committed to reading as much as I could handle on World War I during its centennial year, I used my Kindle to quickly identify about ten books to consider. I'm so happy with my choices: The World War I Reader and Catastrophe 1914: Europe Goes to War. The latter book was a thrilling, but chilling, read. Having read Tuchman's Proud Tower and Guns of August years ago, I thought I was well versed on the precipitating events and opening moves of the Great Powers. Catastrophe provides a thorough overview of causes and strategies for all the major players and a wealth of battlefield detail covering the first five months of the war. Taken together, all the facts, taken mostly from newspaper accounts and letters, paint a sobering picture of pride, cruelty, and insensitivity to the human suffering unleashed in the name of national destiny. I am still haunted by the statistic that 1 million Frenchmen were battlefield casualties (killed, wounded and missing) between Augusts and December, 1914. This is the largest casualty figure among the combatants only because the worst fighting took place on doorstep of the French capital. The data for the French are typical of what others suffered, but are not the worst from a percentage standpoint. The book shows that the French, English and German soldier was sometimes heroic, sometimes unspeakably cruel, but always, by the end of the year, disillusioned. He had been led toward a glorious vision by leaders who were unimaginably vain, unfeeling about anyone except their own families and power circles, and completely foolish about how to conduct war with the new weapons at their disposal. I highly recommend Catastrophe for any history reader and especially for those looking for origins for today's political and military bad news. This is a brilliant book up to the usual standards of Max Hastings. I thoroughly enjoyed every page and he provides convincing rebuttal against all the revisionist crap that is coming from Naill Ferguson and the like about how the war was avoidable, the British were the true aggressors and that Europe under German domination would have been a veritable lah lah land full of happiness and peace.... bah! Max Hastings does a very good job of utterly demolishing this notion. He also details the atrocities committed in France and Belgium in more depth than many other books on World War One and provides a very convincing argument that the Central Powers needed to be stopped at all costs.A great read that is filled with brilliant battlefield narrative, an eye for the politics of the time and the difficulties faced by the mobilising poweres. All this is balanced out with thought provokeing first hand accounts from people who lived in this dark time.
Do You like book Catastrophe 1914: Europe Goes To War (2013)?
Excellent coverage of the insanity that started the mass slaughter that was world war one.
—joshy
Great summary of the start and the first year of the Great War
—codeman
Smart writing, persuasive, full of human interest detail.
—Nora
