The Pity Of War

From inside dust jacket:

For many Americans the First World War is the forgotten war: a war that seems to have fallen into an historical void between the Civil War and World War II. This is surprising given its profound significance to the United States. More than four million Americans were mobilized in 1917-18, of whom more than 100,000 were killed--double the number who died in Vietnam. This was the first, bloody step on the road to globalism which would characterize our foreign policy for the rest of the twentieth century. Even American literature was transformed by the impact of the war on writers like Hemingway and Fitzgerald.

Internationally, more than any other event, the First World War made the twentieth century what it was: It topped the four great empires of the Old World and left a fifth--the British--mortgaged to the hilt. More than nine million men lost their lives, yet none of its stated objectives were met. Rather, it spawned seven decades of Communist rule in Russia, the rise of Adolf Hitler's Third Reich, and the horror of the Holocaust. Now, as the century draws to a close, the time is right for a radical reassessment of the "Great War."

In The Pity of War, Niall Ferguson explodes the myths of 1914-18. He argues that the fatal conflict between Britain and Germany was far from inevitable. It was Britain's declaration of war that needlessly turned a continental conflict into a world war, and it was Britain's economic mismanagement and military inferiority that necessitated American involvement, forever altering the global balance of power.

Ferguson vividly brings back to life one of the seminal catastrophes of the century, not through a dry citation of chronological chapter and verse, but through a series of brilliant chapters that answer the key questions: Why did the war start? Why did it continue" And why did it stop? How did the Germans manage to kill more soldiers than they lost but still end up defeated in November 1918? Above all, why did men fight?

That the war was wicked, horrific, and inhuman is memorialized in part by the poetry of men like Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sasson. And yet, as Ferguson shows, the greates majority of men who fought the war did so with little reluctance and with some enthusiasm. Were they led on by the patriotic propaganda of the press? Or was there a "death wish" abroad, driving ordinary men to their own destruction?

For anyone wanting to understand why wars are fought, why men are willing to fight them, and why the world is as it is today, there is no sharper, more stimulating guide than Niall Ferguson's The Pity of War.

563 pages including notes, bibliography, and index.

There is a remainder mark on the bottom edge of pages.