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Policy Review, Oct/Nov 1999 by West, Woody

JOHN KEEGAN. The First World War. ALFRED A. KNOPF. 475 PAGES. $35.00

BYRON FARWELL. Over There: The United States in the Great War, 191718. WW. NORTON.336 PAGES. $27.95

THE PROMINENCE OF WAR in American life since 1914 constitutes "a virtual Seventy-Five Year War," wrote Robert Nisbet, the late political philosopher, in his 1988 book, The Present Age. It is way beyond obvious that war changes the societies of its participants, not always or entirely for the worse (the assumption that peace is the natural state of mankind can seem fragile upon reflection). Changes fostered by conflict, however, are likely to be dramatic, and Nisbet, rather despondent on the state of the union in what turned out to be his last book, observed, "All wars of any appreciable length have a secularizing effect upon engaged societies, a diminution of the authority of old religious and moral values and a parallel elevation of new utilitarian, hedonistic, or pragmatic values."

When, at last, the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month of 1918 came and with it an end to the horror of World War 1, the British Empire counted a million dead, France 1.7 million. Two million Germans soldiers died, as did 1.7 million Russians, 1.5 million from the Habsburg Empire, 460,000 Italians, and hundreds of thousands of Turks.

The United States, which entered the war in April 1917, suffered far fewer casualties, of course. The first three Americans killed in combat died on the evening of Nov. 2, 1917, during a German raid on a trench held by members of the 2nd Battalion, 16th Infantry Regiment. The U.S. casualty list over the next year was 116,516 dead, 53,402 of them in battle, and 204,002 wounded in 19 months of U.S. belligerency; accidents and disease, especially the outbreak of the global influenza epidemic, killed more Americans than did bullets.

The "Great War," as it used to be called, is still a fitting description despite the vaster carnage of the rest of the century and the appalling transformations the war brought to the destinies of nations - from the grotesque tyranny of Lenin and Stalin to Hitler's National Socialism. The changes in U.S. culture, politics, and economics as a result of the first war were not as ferociously and lethally consequential as those in Germany and Russia. But the changes World War I set in motion here were drastic even by the standards of a country that historically has embraced rapid change and been fascinated by it. The Cold War and the recent nastiness in the Balkans, too, have echoes from the 1914-18 war. Serbia was the fuse then, of course (long ago it was said that the Balkans produce more history than could be consumed locally), and the region's current claim on our attention evokes fresh interest in World War I and makes it remarkably vivid.

"The First World War inaugurated the manufacture of mass death that the Second brought to a pitiless consummation," John Keegan writes in his new book, and "is inexplicable except in terms of the rancours and instabilities left by the earlier conflict." Keegan is one of today's premier military historians, for years a senior lecturer at the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst and the author of a baker's dozen books, The Face of Battle and the recent Fields of Battle: The Wars for North America, among them. In The First World War, he concentrates on the Western and Eastern Fronts in Europe, where the most sanguinary fighting took place; he also recounts the more removed if no less significant episodes in Africa and the Middle East.

AS ONE EXPECTS from Keegan, he navigates with clarity the politics of the colliding alliances, the refined strategic concepts which in practice were anything but refined, and the tactical inanities that heaped the bodies to obscene heights. (For instance, the French and British were dismissive at first of the Germans' heavy deployment of machine guns and continued to order packed infantry assaults, which resulted in terrific slaughter.)

Keegan is both a rigorous historian and a narrative craftsman. He avoids the "presentism" that degrades a good deal of modem historical writing - the imposition of today's standards and perspectives on the past. Thus, he carefully addresses the persistent notion of the British army as "lions led by donkeys" - that is, soldiers commanded by singularly, even criminally, incompetent generals. Some generals indeed were appallingly slow and worse. There was also, however, a technological gap between the massed firepower available and the primitive capacity to direct it in a precise and timely way. Communications were primitive, too - carrier pigeons were standard issue to units. Once the unfit and incapable were weeded out, the generals "came in the main to understand the war's nature and to apply solutions as rational as was possible within the means at hand," Keegan writes. That is not a rousing endorsement, but it is fairer than glib condemnation.

Keegan is adroit at sketching character and the interplay of personalities in the politics of the war, among both the Central Powers and the Allies. He also writes with elegiac grace when the past is resurrected through the men who did the fighting and the dying (he writes of "Tommy Atkins," the long-service, "old sweat" troopers of the Empire who collectively comprised the British Expeditionary Force at the beginning and were nearly wiped out in the early battles at Mons and First Ypres, "Their patriotism was to the little homeland of the regiment.")