This analysis was not based on abstractions but, as Howard (seconded by Porch and Showalter in the Kennedy volume) makes abundantly clear, on a close study of war in the recent past.  Although it is sometimes imagined that the men who fought the Great War were mesmerized by Germany's lightning triumph over France in 1870, this was not so.  If anything, that exemplary demonstration of military efficiency by the Prussian General Staff lost its luster with the passage of time.  Increasingly, it was not the rapidity of the German advance but the tremendous casualties incurred by every frontal attack that preyed on the minds of professional soldiers.  As Showalter observes, even the architect of Germany's victory, Helmuth von Moltke, eventually came to doubt whether such success would ever be possible again.  These apprehensions were strongly reinforced by the example of the American Civil War, with its seemingly endless campaigns of attrition, and later by the Boer War, which proved far longer and bloodier than earlier "colonial" conflicts.

Obviously the men of 1914 were far from indifferent to the historical facts.  Yet it is equally obvious that they failed to interpret those facts correctly.  Facts, after all, do not speak for themselves.  Historical interpretation always involves the weighing of contradictory evidence, and in this respect the military and political leaders of that era may have fallen short.  Too often the facts were filtered through a screen of professional arrogance and presumption thick enough to blind men to the evidence of their senses.  Thus the perverse belief that machine guns would favor a mobile offensive, rather than a static defense, was undoubtedly based less on historical experience than on the need to find some talisman with which to dispel the specter of stalemate.  Similarly, the conviction that the next war would be short--a commonplace in almost every age--had become an article of faith by 1914 not because history pointed that way but because it was the only kind of war anyone could imagine fighting on a rational basis.

It seems reasonable to conclude, in other words, that the professional obligation to make war--to preserve war's usefulness as an instrument of policy--finally prevailed in the face of mounting evidence of the futility this might involve.  Europe slithered into war not because its leaders lacked historical knowledge but because the issues they faced were complex and the leaders lacked the intellectual detachment and emotional independence necessary to make proper use of the knowledge they had.

Fair enough, up to a point.  In the end, however, we may wonder whether greater detachment and independence could really have saved them.  Consider, for example, the European response to the Russo-Japanese War, to which Howard draws particular attention in his essay "Men Against Fire," which serves as a kind of center-piece to the present volume.  The Russo-Japanese War began in February, 1904, and ended nineteen months later when Russia, beaten on land and sea, made modest territorial concessions to Japan and abandoned its expansionist policy in the Far East.  It was a modern conflict in every sense, comparable in scale to European wars of the previous century, and fought with weapons and tactics similar to those employed in Europe ten years later.  Its revolutionary consequences for Russia are well known, and on this account the war is commonly regarded as yet another harbinger of disaster that the statesmen of that era somehow contrived to misunderstand.  As Howard points out, however, the war looked different to contemporaries than it does to us, and it is by no means easy to think of any historical arguments that might have set them straight.

The Russo-Japanese War confirmed some of the bleaker inferences European soldiers had drawn from the recent past.  Pitched battles had invariably produced high casualties.  Some had degenerated into lengthy trench campaigns recalling those of the American Civil War.  The war had also gone on for what seemed a dangerously long time--serious fighting on land lasted thirteen months.  On the other hand, the war also offered grounds for optimism.  Despite heavy casualties, a number of frontal assaults had succeeded against entrenched opponents with modern weapons.  A few had actually been driven home by bayonets alone--a fact that seemed noteworthy even when due account was taken of the superior discipline and cohesiveness that were already being attributed to the Japanese.  Moreover, although the war had gone on too long, its indecisiveness was obviously connected to the endemic supply problems that had plagued both sides: the Russian and Japanese armies had fought at the ends of lines of communications far more extended than they could ever be in Europe.  If those armies had enjoyed more direct and abundant logistical support, the decision would surely have come sooner.  As it was, the war had still produced a clear winner, strategically and politically.

In short, as Howard demonstrates, the Russo-Japanese War helped Europeans resolve to their own satisfaction the worst ambiguities of recent military history.  It contributed to the extraordinary emphasis on morale that dominated tactical thinking in 1914 and to the cult of the offensive that shaped the strategy of every belligerent.  Even more tragically, it demonstrated the vital importance of keeping the engines of industrialized warfare well stoked with men and material in order to get the bloody business over with as quickly as possible.  A few years later European armies would perform logistical prodigies that could scarcely have been imagined a generation earlier, and which would have inspired amazement even if they had not been so pointless.

This subsequent experience has made obvious the crucial defect in the contemporary understanding of the Russo-Japanese War: that conflict was not made longer or bloodier by poor logistics.  If anything, the opposite was true: more plentiful supplies and reinforcements would almost certainly have lengthened the war and made it less, rather than more, decisive.  Yet there are no historical precedents nor any form of historical analysis, however disinterested, that could have led to this insight.  Anyone who had claimed in 1910 that "history showed" that excellent logistics would make the next war less decisive would have been regarded as sadly ill-informed--as he would today, for that matter.

In the final analysis, Howard's account suggests that the historical understanding of the men who made the Great War was compromised less by prejudice or undue selectivity than by their overestimation of what that evidence could teach them.  Historical study seemed to them something like double-entry bookkeeping; it would yield the right answers if only they knew enough.  It was the historian's responsibility to assign the correct value to each line in the ledger--no easy task, admittedly, but achievable given sufficient diligence and circumspection.  The notion that the right evidence might not exist, and that the future was in the strictest sense incalculable, would have seemed quite naive.

The shallowness of this conception becomes even more apparent in light of Eliot Cohen's essay on Churchill.  As Cohen shows, Churchill's skill in cultivating the Americans and the Russians and his conduct as a war leader generally were both shaped by a quarter-century of historical study, first for his multi-volume history of World War I, The World Crisis, and then for his biography of his great ancestor, Marlborough.  Both works, Cohen observes, employ "the same themes and diction as the great state papers of 1940-1945."  It was at least in part from them--that is, from the concentrated effort of historical reflection that they entailed--that Churchill acquired his uncanny ability to pick out "the two or three `supreme facts' governing a situation," and sharpened his sense of the "true proportion" of military and political events, which stayed with him even in the face of what most contemporaries regarded, not without reason, as unprecedented disasters.

The view of the past as a haphazard collection of useful precedents still dominates most peoples' common-sense impression of what it means to learn from history.  The impression, however, is mistaken and in the long run it can only undermine our already fragile sense of community with earlier times: the past will lie to us, as it lied to our ancestors, so we will stop questioning it, having failed to notice that it is the questions, not the answers, that matter.  History--deriving from the Greek word for "inquiry"--is not something you know.  It is, like philosophy, something you do.  Its hallmark, as Churchill knew as well as any professional scholar, is not memory, but curiosity.  Despite its irreducible uncertainty, it remains indispensable to public life in a free society, not because a knowledge of the past promises a future free of risk, but because--as both these volumes illustrate so splendidly--the effort of historical understanding cultivates qualities of tolerance, objectivity, and dispassionate judgment that can only make the world a more decent and less dangerous place.

Daniel Moran teaches history at the University of Northern Colorado.

Essay Types: Book Review