Gulistan state university department of the english language and literature course paper

2.2 The most popular literature created during the war


The First World War  by Michael Howard


First of all, as a standalone book, this is the best, single, short introduction to the whole First World War. It’s a remarkable piece of concision, where Sir Michael has apparently absorbed all the research about the First World War and then boiled it down to 150 pages


But it’s also partly because of who wrote it. Sir Michael Howard is a very fine historian by any measure, but certainly the greatest living military historian or historian of warfare. He’s someone who has fought—he won a medal in the Second World War; he’s thought about war all his life. He’s brought all of that thinking and experience and writing and advising policymakers and all sorts of other things and put it all into this one tiny little book about the First World War. So it’s incredibly rich and wise and balanced in the views that it takes. And because it also reflects all the research that was excellent when he wrote it, it’s the very best way for a beginner to get into the First World War.


 Hew Strachan’s book The First World War
The bibliography alone is 50 pages. And it’s almost all about just the first year of the war, 1914.
In many ways, I think Sir Hew Strachan is the natural successor to Michael Howard. He was also Professor of Military History here in Oxford, at All Souls College.
What’s different about this book is that although, again, it’s a synthesis, what he’s done is he’s gone off and read everything in every language and he’s identified—I think correctly—that you can’t understand any war, certainly not the First World War, unless you look at it from all different sides involved. War is a bit like other people’s marriages; it’s hard enough to understand even when you know all the facts. When you only know one side of the story, you have no chance. So his attitude throughout is comparative. He looks at it from the British point of view, the German point of view, the Austrian point of view and so on and so forth. You get a real sense of the similarities and differences between the countries and their experience of the war and what they’re all about. That’s the first point.
The second point is that he understands something that, particularly in Britain, we tend to forget. The centenary commemorations were a good example: you could have been excused for thinking that the British were the only people in the First World War. There was very little discussion of their allies and almost none of their enemies. Whereas Hew Strachan is saying, ‘No, you can’t do that. You’ve got to think of it as a world war. It’s called the First World War for a reason. You’ve got to put the world back in the world war.’ He sees it very much as a global event.
Although, in theory, the book is only about 1914, in practice he spends a lot of time talking about themes that run through the whole war, like the financing of it. He also tells the whole story of the war in Africa, all the way up to 1918, in this first volume. So it’s much bigger than it pretends to be.
You get a very real sense of how the war moved from being just a bunch of Europeans fighting each other into a World War, both in terms of the European war sucking in the resources of the world to add fuel to the fire but also in terms of the war being exported to Africa, to Asia, to the Americas.