All along our trip through the continent, we were dogged by the shadow of the war that had erupted across western Europe exactly one hundred years ago that fall. We more or less traced the entire western front, from the coast of Belgium through the Ardennes forest and the mountains into protected Luxembourg, and then down to the Rhine, and then up into Switzerland.
It felt like we were tracing the fault line of the great history rift between France and Germany, that dates back to Antiquity.
We took the Flanders Fields battlefield tour on Halloween. It included a visit to the Allied and German cemeteries, as well as the pill box ruins on the hill overlooking the town of Ieper. This is exactly where the line stalled for four years, moving only minutely. It is the hinge of entire western front, I realized. Neither side could overwhelm the other, although each got a momentary advantage, that turned out to be fleeting---until the very end of the war where the German line collapsed entirely.
There is a strawberry and potato farm, that the tour bus stops at. You can buy the wares out of vending machine by the road. Looking out over the fields one can imagine a superimposed vision of all the corpses that piled up there, and the blood that drained down into the soil, and the chlorinated gases that seeped into them. One cannot blame the Belgians for wanting to get their lives back, as did they even so long ago now.
Of course I even felt the war theme going down into Morocco, where my grandfather had been part of the invasion of North Africa in 1942. That war was also having plenty of anniversaries across Europe too. But most historians will tell you that it was in a large part a continuation of the one that started in 1914. It just found a way to revive and keep going, in an even more horrific fashion.
One of the great historical mysteries of all time has been how did the Great War start? In a strict sense, it's an easy question: it started when Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia, and invaded it. The broader and more interesting question has always been: how did a localized war in the Balkans between two neighboring countries (something that had become almost routine at that point) become one that engulfed the entire world in flames for a couple years?
Actually that too has a fairly simple answer. The dominos that feel into place, bring one nation after another across the globe at war with each other, is very well documented. There is very little mystery into the diplomatic sequence, that even had the U.S.A. sending an "expeditionary force" to the heart of medieval European history---one that is still there to this day.
The mystery has always been in the issue of how did it come about that this domino-like boobytrapped system could arise, in which a localized Balkan War could bring the entire machinery of a global war into motion. How did this situation come about in Europe, and in the world? How did the great minds of diplomacy and statecraft seemingly construct, through public policy and diplomacy, this giant hidden Death Machine that sprung into motion seemingly out of the blue?
The standard view of history can be summed up by George Kennan, recognized as the one of the great historical thinkers of the group that was once called the Establishment. In the foreward to a book on the Great War and its origins, Kennan wrote that it was as if Europe "forgot how not to go to war." (italics added)
In other words, according to this view, it just sort of happened.
But it turns out this is not true at all. This view is completely in error.
At least this is how what I take away from having just finished a copy of The Sleepwalkers, by Christopher Clark. I picked up a copy at the British Museum when I was visiting London over Christmas.
This book was probably the most acclaimed book that came out in the recent spate of books about World War I, because of the centennial. The back cover is full of adulatory quotes from other well-known mainstream historians.
Even just one hundred pages into it, I knew it was a masterpiece of historical writing. Clark is an immaculate research, and goes back looking into primary sources in the years before the war, in a way that probably no one has ever done. This is partly because in the years after the war, the publications were dominated by the historical players from the war itself, and they wrote their impressions of what had happened, which Clark proves in many cases are very different from their thoughts and the time, as evidenced by not only their journals and private correspondence, but by the public record itself.
It's hard not the feel that Clark has completely demolished the previous Establishment view elaborated by Kennan and others. There is no going back after this book.
So what did happen? Clark never comes out and says it, but to anyone reading the book, the answer is very clear by the end. The boobytrapped set of alliances that turned a localized war (fought because Austria did not get satisfaction from Serbia in regard to the assassination of its imperial heir) into a global one in which millions of corpses were heaped in fields was not something that "just happened."
The Death Machine Boobytrap was actually the very clear design of certain individuals, as evidenced by what they themselves wrote. What happened was exactly what these individuals wanted to happen. Of course they didn't say that letter.
Clark makes it very clear with his evidence that the leaders of one nation in particular are most identifiable as the culprits. Without their clear urging for the "Balkan Inception" to become a continent wide war, it is doubtful that such a breakout would have taken place, even up to the very threshold of the war. These individuals were doing everything they could to make this Great War happen, despite so many others not wanting it to happen. Clark makes it easy to imagine that history could have taken a much different path. A hundred years later, we are living in the consequences of the path that was actually taken.
Knowing who is always fundamental is solving any mystery. After reading Clark, I felt like I had been given the solution to the greatest whodunit of modern history. It felt satisfying, even as it was sad to contemplate that it might not have even needed to happen. But that is a deep philosophical question, not one of history.
So which nation was it, whose leaders Clark proved were hell-bent on making this little Balkan war into a much bigger one, in which long-held grudges could be avenged, and new balances of power staked out across the continent and the world?
Well, I don't want to spoil it for you. But I will say that the answer is a big twist. It is not the first country most people would suspect, even for the heretics outside the mainstream. But it all makes perfect sense, after you see it.
The only hint I'd provide is this: in my opinion, the nation whose leaders were most responsible for the coming about of the continent-wide near-apocalypse is the that has sadly and ironically suffered the greatest diminution of its status and its cultural radiance from what it was a hundred years ago. It is the country that most feels like a shell of its former self, where one can only imagine what it must have been like when it was still a great nation.
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