Cassell, 1959, 214 p including 2 p Preface, 1 p Bibliography, 8 p Index.

The book’s title is 1914 and it is a history of the events of that fateful year but of course it is its latter half which will inevitably predominate any such undertaking. The year’s early months are all but ignored, Chapter 1 beginning with “That year the summer came ungrudgingly early.” Nevertheless, Cameron sets the scene of that last hurrah of Edwardian life. (Okay, the old King had died four years before but nothing much had changed in the interim.) He runs through life in Britain in the realms of painting, music, theatre (and music-hall,) dance, literature, fashion, and the nascent cinema with some detail. (At the White City, the Anglo-American Exposition proclaimed the “Wonders of the Panama Canal – the Grand Canyon – America’s skyscrapers.”)

In British politics, though the calls for votes for women were becoming ever louder, the Irish question was to the fore: this was the year of the mutiny at the Curragh. Other more normal political divisions were evident. In one of the broadsheets a Mr John Littlejohns from Pontypridd alliteratively thundered, “Mr W Churchill is the biggest braggart of blatant braggadocio in the brutish trituration of bombastic Radicalism!” continuing his diatribe with, “Mr Lloyd George addresses public meetings with the grimace of a mountebank and the spite of a viper. The present Government is a mawkish medley of parasitical lugubriousness, a neurotic contemporary amalgam of mental profligacy, which seeks to disintegrate the empire with persuasive pasquinades, Liberal levity, volatile vivacity, and designed deception.”

No one thought of war. When the crisis came there was no immediate consensus for war; the Manchester Guardian was for neutrality. Yet Europe, and Britain, slid into it just the same.

Despite the warnings from the last century, the US Civil War and the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 (whose treaty arguably pointed directly to this later conflict,) the cost in lives still came to many as a shock. France lost 800,000 men in the five months of fighting in 1914; most in the Battle of the Frontiers. Cameron says, “It was not to recover from this for many a generation.” (It certainly hadn’t by 1940.)

British troops took things stoically for the most part. Unlike the Germans, known to sing ‘Die Wacht am Rhein’ or the French with their ‘Marseillaise’ or ‘Brabançonne’ they did not march to tunes of patriotism, honour, or glory but instead to songs irreverent and frequently obscene: above all to “an inconsequential ditty called ‘Tipperary’, a mild, music-hall number the uproarious, passionate, almost immortal success of which was a mystery never in history to be explained, or indeed repeated.” Its triumph astonished its jobbing vaudeville composer Jack Judge “to his dying day.”

Yet when they had to the Tommies fought fiercely. On August 27 a battalion of Munster Fusiliers, acting as a sort of rearguard during the retreat from Mons, “became detached from the main body of the 1st Guards Brigade. They fought for almost twelve continuous hours against huge odds, and died, as far as was ever learned, to a man.” Cameron says, “Mons itself could have been, almost was a disaster.”

At home rumours abounded – myths of Cossacks with snow-caked boots landing all over Britain to defend the West. This was around the same time as the Russian armies were being surrounded at Tannenberg, where almost every man was captured or killed, including General Samsonoff. (In Solzhenitsyn’s August 1914 Samsonoff is portrayed as committing suicide.) News of this defeat did not pass the Allied censor. Spy fever ensured that “every pull-up and tea-room … fell over themselves to dismiss anyone remotely suspected of alien blood; not a hard thing to detect in the catering trade.”

Though the Germans undoubtedly committed what would now be called war crimes, the soldiers of the BEF was not deceived by the word pictures in the British or even more furious French press. They knew their enemy: “Jerry was a coarse bastard, but if he was the undisciplined sot he was said to be, would he make such a superbly professional job of his sandbag barricades and his trenchings, would he stand in his defensive positions so resolutely and long?”

The steel helmet when it eventually came was apparently “accepted reluctantly, even derisively; it was finally sanctified by a black-and-white artist called Bruce Bairnsfather, who had invented a strange philosophical, whiskered archetype for the middle-aged Tommy whom he called ‘Old Bill’.”

Towards the end of the year income tax was raised for earned income from 9d in the pound to one shilling and for unearned income from 1/3d to 1/6d. Beer went up a penny a pint (a staggering 25% increase,) tea duty from 5d to 8d a pound. All the new taxes would bring in only £65 million. The war was costing £8 million a week. France, Russia, Belgium and Serbia all requested loans from the pre-eminent financial power, Britain.

It was a strange war. Days after the naval defeat at Coronel had been avenged by the sinking of the Scharnhorst, the Gneisenau, the Nurnberg and the Liepzig in the Battle of the Falkland Islands, HMS Bulwark, a pre-dreadnought battleship, inexplicably exploded in Sheerness harbour, with only twelve survivors of its nearly 800 crew. As Beatty was to say at Jutland two years later, there was “something wrong with our bloody ships.”)

This book is an intensely readable overview of those months of peace and war. Though its focus is understandably for the most part on Britain it covers the salient points of the war’s spread into the wider world. It is all the more readable for not concentrating on events in diplomacy or on the battlefields.

Sensitivity notes: Lenin is referred to as having ‘Jewish’ eyes and there is a reference to the thudding music of the negroes.

Pedant’s corner:- The words ‘England’ or ‘English’ is frequently employed to mean ‘Britain’ or ‘British’, England is at one point described as an island. Otherwise; “the land-locked harbour of Port Stanley” (I had no idea of the precise geography here but wondered: how can a harbour be land-locked? I have since looked it up. There is indeed a channel to the sea.)

Birlinn, 2001, 384 p.

I picked this up in a remainder bookshop and was intrigued by the blurb describing it as “one of the most decisive but least well-known battles in history.” I knew of course of the wider war it was a part of, the Franco-Prussian War (the author says that is a misnomer, since after the Austro-Prussian War the South German States were treaty-bound to take Prussia’s side in the event of war so it was really a Franco-German war) but not too much of its detail.

The immediate background of the war is well laid out; the German resentment at continually being pushed around by the French over the previous centuries; Bismarck’s determination to inveigle France into war as a means to unite the German states under Prussian leadership; his manipulation of an impasse over the succession to the Spanish throne (the war is therefore also the Second Spanish War of Succession) and of the wording of the Ems telegram to make it appear as an insult; but the war was totally unnecessary. The well entrenched regime of Napoleon III declared it due to public opinion in Paris, in effect in a hissy fit.

While their soldiers performed admirably the French armies were poorly handled. The commander, Marshal Bazaine – the first Frenchman to achieve that lofty rank after starting his career as a Fusilier (in British terms a private) was in doubt about their prospects from the start, “Nous marchons à un désastre.” (“We are walking into a disaster.”) Sadly General Ducrot’s belter of a remark on the situation the French later found themselves in at Sedan “Nous sommes dans un pot de chambre, et nous y serons emmerdé,” (“We are in a chamber pot, and we’re going to be shat on,”) is not recounted here.

While personally brave and having a distinguished record in the Crimea and elsewhere Bazaine was temperamentally unsuited to the highest command. He did not feel comfortable being in control of other high ranking officers who were his social superiors. His indecision and caution, his lack of appreciation of the possibility of a crushing victory were fatal. With the exception of First Army’s General Steinmetz, who nearly threw victory away, the Germans were much better served.

According to the author the decisive day of the war was not at Sedan but at Mars la Tour (or Vionville.) The French Army of the Rhine was trying to escape to Verdun from Metz as a result of the defeat of the Army of Chalons in earlier engagements. A small portion of the German army attacked it in the belief it was only a rearguard. Eventually realising his position General Alvensleben, in charge of III Corps, bluffed the French by continual attacks crucially backed up by artillery. His last gamble, known as Von Bredow’s Death Ride, was the last time a cavalry charge had an influence on the outcome of a battle. (The writing on the wall for that military arm was amply demonstrated elsewhere in the conflict, however.) Had the French Generals realised the weakness of the German force and the chance of catching the rest of the German army in flank they could have won a crushing victory. As it was it is the author’s contention that all that followed, another two French defeats, the retreat to Metz, the investment there, the Army of Chalons marching to the relief of the Army of the Rhine for political rather than military reasons, its encirclement at Sedan, the fall of Napoleon III’s dynasty, the Commune, the Siege of Paris, the unification of Germany, the ceding of Alsace and Lorraine, sowed the seeds of the First and Second World Wars and that this could have been prevented by a different outcome at Mars la Tour.

Like the US Civil War less than a decade earlier, this was an industrialised war. (The heavy casualties in both these conflicts ought to have signalled to anyone concerned the devastation that modern weapons inflicted.)

The book is lavishly provided with maps and photographs of the battleground locations but the text leaves something to be desired. The phrases, “It will be remembered that,” “The reader will recall,” “As we shall see,” “As we have seen,” “And this is why,” occur frequently and annoyingly. In addition the book goes on to recount the Battles of Gravelotte and St Privat of two days later but rather undermines its own main argument by saying that here too better French leadership could have ensured the Germans were beaten.