Just Finished Reading: 1913 – The World before the Great War by Charles Emmerson (FP: 2013)

I have an itch I’m attempting to scratch. This particular itch is a question that puzzles me greatly: How did the world stumble, wander or advance singing patriotic songs into the greatest disaster in human history AKA the First World War which led to the Second World War, the Cold War and all the other lovely things we are living with today. How could an apparently sophisticated civilisation abandon peace – 100 years in Europe – for the madness that was the Western Front and beyond?

Ironically, so I thought as I read the introduction to this impressive and reasonably hefty (457 pages) volume, this was precisely not the remit the author set himself. What he tried to achieve, and I believe succeeded admirably in doing so, was to present 1913 from a perspective I’ve never come across before. Normal histories self-consciously look back at a time or event with the full benefits of 20:20 hindsight, knowing what is coming, judging people on things they hadn’t done yet, and viewing the whole thing with Olympian omniscience. This book turned that whole idea on its head and looked at that fateful year from within 1913 itself – in effect looking forward, without all of the benefits of 21st century knowledge and experience, in order to understand what the people of the time, unaware of what was coming down the tracks directly at them, thought, hoped and feared for the year(s) ahead. As well as this (as far as I know) unique viewpoint, the author subverted the other convention be progressing geographically across the globe rather than the more expected chronological journey through that last year when things still seemed to make sense.

Moving from London across the European continent, hopping from capital city to capital city to narrative sprang across the Atlantic, down the Americas, into the Middle and Far East before returning to London. What the author unearthed time and again was the (by and large) global confidence in the future. With increased global integration, trade, communications technology, faster ships and the newly invented airplane it increasingly looked like the world was drawing together in a truly global community. Oh, there were problems, but that was hardly new or insurmountable. The Germans wanted a bigger slice of the pie and an Empire to play with, The Russians were spending much energy, money and blood forging a modern European state out of a vast peasant empire in the east, China was struggling with modernity, civil strife and the echoes of 19th century western imperialism whilst Japan grew into a regional super-power much to everyone’s surprise. But it wasn’t anything that the European powers and the growing power of the USA couldn’t handle or manipulate to their own benefit. 1914 and the years after that seemed to herald a new golden age of peace and prosperity like never before.

The dissenting voices where very much on the fringe of things – the Futurists, Anarchists and Revolutionaries who talked about and sometimes acted as if war was a good thing that improved the human stock and gave rise to humanities best qualities. Marginalised and laughed at they were universally dismissed as a passing fad and something to tut over in the morning papers. No one imagined that a terrorist group could assassinate a crowned head of Europe even if this had happened or had been attempted before. Certainly no one imagined that such an outrage could lead, step by step, to a conflict drawing in every major power on the planet. The very thought, never mind the reality, was inconceivable.

That, I think, was the most surprising aspect of this well thought out, fascinating and weirdly almost surreal book – the fact that no one who should have known what was coming had a clue about what was going to happen the very next year. Maybe it just shows, like the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989 onwards, that even major world changing events can ‘just happen’ and get quickly out of control (or the fact that control of historic events is a myth and quite possibly a dangerous myth). Maybe it shows that once the trigger event occurred that what happened was not inevitable. If people had acted in other ways then the tragedy could have been avoided. Maybe the search for causes is a fruitless one as there are either too many to count or that simply no ‘cause’ as such even exists – just a chain of events that, if re-run from the beginning, would result in a different outcome each time. This certainly gave me much, much food for thought and will give me a very good grounding in the original conditions before all hell broke loose so that I can compare theories about why it all fell apart. Certainly an important contribution to the increasing number of books on WW1 and, therefore, highly recommended – just don’t expect and answer to the possibly pointless ‘why’ question.

[2015 Reading Challenge: A Non-Fiction Book – COMPLETE (2/50)]