In 1962, when Barbara Tuchman published “The Guns of August,” her Pulitzer Prize-winning account of the opening of World War I, she found a ready reader in President John F. Kennedy. As the Cuban missile crisis unfolded, the book confirmed the president’s belief that war was more likely to break out by accident than by design, and in the folly of a brinkmanship that leaves no fallback position short of actually fighting.

In 2013, too, commentators have been ready to see analogies between the Middle East of today and the Balkans of a century ago. Syria is paired with Sarajevo for reasons more compelling than alliteration. A small power’s local concerns have the capacity to embroil stronger states in a crisis that none of them can manage.

The political and chattering classes are right to be worried: if any region today could cause a crisis comparable to that of 1914, it is the Middle East. They need a new book on the outbreak of World War I, and now they have it in “Catastrophe 1914: Europe Goes to War.”

An outstanding historian of the Second World War, Max Hastings has made a victorious foray into a conflict with which he is less familiar. His fans will recognize the trademarks: trenchant and Olympian judgments that eschew quirkiness in their pursuit of common sense and that are supplemented by extensive quotations from lower-grade participants: the victims and workhorses of others’ decisions.

His attention to their voices contrasts with Tuchman’s focus on the statesmen and the generals. Mr. Hastings makes clear at the outset of “Catastrophe” that, as a boy, he was captivated by the drama of Tuchman’s narrative, and he clearly hopes that his book will do for the 100th anniversary of the war’s outbreak what Tuchman’s did for its 50th. Since most national archives were still not open when she was writing, she had to rely largely on published memoirs. Not only can Mr. Hastings cull from a range of less familiar sources (even if they could be better footnoted), but he also covers six months to her one. And, despite the president’s reading of “The Guns of August,” Tuchman actually said little about the war’s origins. Mr. Hastings says much more, and sees it very differently. Tuchman has been supplanted.

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Since the early 1960s, we have gone through another turn in the cyclical debate on the war’s origins. It was in 1961 that the German scholar Fritz Fischer published “Germany’s Aims in the First World War” (which appeared in English in 1967), the first of his two books arguing that Germany had caused the war and thereby connecting the policies of imperial Germany with those of the Nazis. In the late 1930s, Kennedy had been taught at Harvard that, because nobody in particular had caused the war, Germany was not guilty as charged in the Versailles peace treaty of 1919.

In the bitter controversy that followed Fischer’s book, historians outside Germany were readier to accept his thesis than those within. Today that relationship is reversed. In Germany, Fischer’s is now the prevailing view, which is one very obvious reason why the Federal Republic does not know how to approach the war’s centenary.

Max Hastings Credit Michael Lionstar

Outside Germany, the academic consensus is reflected in the uncritical acceptance of Christopher Clark’s recent book, “The Sleepwalkers,” which restates the view that Kennedy was brought up with — that, in David Lloyd George’s sentence, “Europe slithered over the brink into the boiling caldron of war.” In other words, a British prime minister, like an American president, concluded that the war was caused by a collapse of the international order more than by any one country in particular.

Although uncharacteristically cautious in his choice of words, Mr. Hastings disagrees with Mr. Clark, and with Kennedy and Tuchman. For him, Germany caused the war, which means that Russia, France and Britain fought because Germany’s actions left them with little alternative. That is a fair and balanced view of how the three Entente powers read the events of July 1914. They were convinced that Austria-Hungary would only exploit the murder of Franz Ferdinand to initiate a Balkan war against Serbia if Germany was pulling the strings. They underestimated, as Mr. Hastings tends to do, the determination within Austria-Hungary to use a local war to resolve the challenges that South Slav nationalism presented to the future viability of the Hapsburg empire.

If Mr. Hastings shows sympathy for the Entente’s leaders as war approached, he displays little for most of them thereafter, or for their generals and those of their enemies. He gives the French commander in chief, Joseph Joffre, credit for the “miracle” of the Marne and praises the German staff officer Max Hoffmann for the victory at Tannenberg that started the careers of Paul von Hindenburg and Erich Ludendorff, but few other senior figures are spared his forthright criticisms.

Perhaps he would have been more forgiving of the French Army’s lack of heavy artillery, its failure to replace enough of its colorful uniforms and its commitment to what was termed the “spirit of the offensive” if he had focused more on its pre-1914 debates on doctrine. The army deliberated how to cope with the fire-swept battlefield while facing the distrust of the politicians of the Third Republic, including debates about the length of military service. The French Army’s difficulty was not a lack of solutions: it had too many and it still had not decided among them by 1914.

“Catastrophe” is a book written with an eye cocked to the Anglophone audience and its inherited half-truths about the war. By taking a pan-European perspective, Mr. Hastings punctures these with directness and brio. He accuses Britain of pursuing what he calls “gesture” strategy, which in this context means making a Continental commitment without an army designed for Continental war.

In his memoirs, Richard Burdon Haldane, the principal architect of the British Expeditionary Force sent to France in 1914, said that this commitment was the task for which the force had always been destined. If so, it was singularly ill fitted for it: the army was tiny, it did not have conscription, and its higher command lacked the structures or expertise for European war. It had been optimized for colonial warfare (which makes its poor performance in operations outside Europe in 1914 and thereafter particularly perverse).

The navy was Britain’s instrument for major war, and Britain’s allies held it in such high regard because they believed that its capacity to wage economic warfare would be rapidly decisive. This was the real gesture strategy: in July 1914, Britain’s economic strength, resting as it did on free trade and British neutrality, depended on stable international order, and so its economy was no more ready for war than anybody else’s.

But these were also reasons that Britain had to fight for Belgium. The rights of a small nation, the protection of its neutrality and the sanctity of international law were — strategically, as well as morally — of sufficient importance to British views of the international order to make this “a war of necessity,” not “a war of choice.”

It is not hard to see how the ideas in this book carry a special resonance in our time.


Europe Goes to War

By Max Hastings

Illustrated. 628 pages. Alfred A. Knopf. $35.

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