First, the war could have easily been avoided with a little basic diplomacy. Second, the armies mostly occupied trenches, stretching nearly 500 miles, and took turns attacking the other's trenches and getting massacred in the process. Millions of young men — the lost generation — sacrificed their lives for little gain. And this went on for years.
European countries had been making war against each other for centuries, and so most of them already had plans for the next war. The generals and national leaders seemed too eager to put these plans into effect, allowing an obscure assassination in a secondary country to escalate into global war. But technology made the war bigger and more deadly than these generals, accustomed to soldiers charging on horseback, knew how to deal with. And so armies facing each other in trenches and slaughtering each other became all but inevitable.
While the technology to kill had advanced, the technology to communicate with one's armies had not kept pace, Keegan observes. Generals often had no idea what was going on on the battlefield until it was too late.
Americans like to believe that their late entry into the war turned the tide, but this British war historian judges the Americans mostly irrelevant and gives them very few pages in his book. "It was indeed immaterial whether the doughboys fought well or not," he says. The mere fact that the Germans had run out of young men by 1918 made their army ready to topple when American soldiers started landing in Europe in large numbers.
And then the stupid war was followed by a stupid peace treaty that made the next war all but inevitable.
Keegan takes a broad view of the war, covering not just the major battles like Verdun and Somme but also telling us what was going on in Turkey, Italy, Russia, at sea and elsewhere. This books offers an intelligent overview of a stupid war.
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