Matt's Reviews > A World Undone: The Story of the Great War, 1914 to 1918

My wife and I are expecting a baby any day now. Any moment, really. And I thought about that as I finished this book: how it might be the last book I ever read. Ever. At least the last book that doesn’t involve talking bears or talking cows or talking bean-pods or whatever talking creature populates the books that babies read these days.

Lately, I’ve been obsessed with World War I. A few weeks ago, while at Barnes & Noble, I was looking for a good book on World War I, fully acknowledging that World War I might be the last frivolous historical obsession I ever have. Ever. Other than an obsession with the last years of my carefree youth.

So there I was, in the book aisle, facing my reality, pondering my last historical obsession, and the last book with which to indulge it.

I chose G.J. Meyer’s A World Undone: The Story of the Great War, 1914-1918.

At first glance, it doesn’t have a lot to recommend it. For one, I’d never heard of it before, in any mention of single-volume histories of the war (well-known entries include books by John Keegan, SLA Marshall, and Martin Gilbert). The author, too, was mysterious to me, an enigma veiled by initials.

Furthermore, one of the cover blurbs proudly states that this book is a top-choice of the “resident historian” of the History Channel. I’m not even sure what that’s supposed to mean. What exactly does the resident historian do? Does he find the ice roads for each season of Ice Road Truckers? The last time I tried to watch the History Channel, they served up an all-day marathon of Pawn Stars, which not only has nothing to do with history, but actually works against it (pawn shops are to history what Wal-Mart developments are to Civil War Battlefields).

In short, I was about to put the book down and go about my merry way. But then, obviously, I bought it instead. The story behind that isn’t important (in short: it involves me talking my wife out of a B&N gift card in exchange for cleaning the bathtub).

It was a fortunate choice. I do not want this to be the last book I read on World War I. I do not want this to be the last book I read on any subject. However, it is a great first book to read on World War I. I should know, since this is my second one-volume history of WWI in a row, and it is far more enjoyable than the first. (No offense, John Keegan).

Being on Goodreads, I’ve gotten some really good recommendations on WWI books. Books that cover everything from battlefields to economics to cultural repercussions. Many of them, though, seem really intimidating. And the thing about the Great War is that it’s already an intimidating subject. It’s easy to get turned off before you get started, and move on to the relatively simpler milieu of World War II: Germans = bad; Americans = good; and Russians = shrug.

A World Undone is a book for the masses. It is expansive, yet accessible; detailed, but clear; and entertaining as hell. It doesn’t come with Keegan’s pedigree. It does not bog down in detailed analyses. If you already know a lot about the subject, you probably don’t need to read this book; it does not require heavy mental lifting. It is, first and foremost, a narrative rooted in humanity.

A major appeal to this book is its structure. Any one-volume history of World War I must deal with a crucial calculation: scope verses space. A great many things happened during the war, to a great many people, in places all over the globe and under the sea. Moreover, many of these things were happening simultaneously. An author facing such a calculation usually chooses between two options: maintaining a chronological narrative; or compartmentalizing the narrative (e.g., a chapter on the Western Front, a chapter on naval battles, etc.).

Meyer utilizes a hybrid approach. For the most part, he tells the story of World War I, from Archduke Franz Ferdinand’s murder to the Armistice of November, 11, 1918, in chronological fashion. While this could potentially be confusing, he pays incredibly close attention to shifting smoothly from theater to theater. By doing this, he is able to draw important connections between the Western Front and Eastern Front, and how the distribution of manpower and materiel dictated strategy. The war formed a huge web, and pulling on one strand inevitably caused all other strands to tremble. (It also helps that Meyer mostly ignores lesser theaters, such as the battles in Africa. The areas of concentration are the Western and Eastern Fronts, and the Dardanelles, which is how it should be in a book for the vox populi).

After each narrative chapter, Meyer inserts a Background chapter, complete with its own font (sans-serif). These sections cover topics that can’t easily be inserted into the main narrative, or that add depth and dimension to the overall story. There are Background sections on the Serbs, the Junkers, the Ottoman Empire, war poetry, airplanes and tanks, Lawrence of Arabia, and the Armenian Genocide. These short chapters tended to be among the most fascinating and lively in the book. For instance, in writing about the Ottoman Turks, Meyer relates how Prince Mustafa, son of Suleiman the Magnificent, was executed by five assassins “whose tongues had been slit and eardrums broken so that they would hear no secrets and could never speak of what they saw.” (Though one wonders how they were given their commands to kill).

Meyer did not set out to break new ground. He does not attempt to reinterpret World War I. He has no particular axe to grind. He is not like John Mosier, arguing that the Americans won the war, or like Niall Ferguson, arguing that the British started it. To the contrary, he stays on the beaten path. Further, this is not a scholarly work. If you look in the notes, you will see a heavy reliance on secondary sources.

This is not a criticism. In his introduction, Meyer’s stated intent to is write a user-friendly history of the war. He accomplishes this.

His writing style is not elegant, yet it is admirably clean and readable, especially after all the trouble I had with Keegan’s clause-ridden, stuttering sentences. He does a good job segueing between the god’s-eye-view and the recollections of the common soldiers (though I wish he’d used block-quotes when excerpting long passages; I’ve always been a believer that three or more excerpted sentences deserve a block-quote).

In describing battles, Meyer avoids getting drowned in the Roman numeral soup of Armies and Corps and Divisions. For the most part, with some important exceptions, he doesn’t try to detail the individual movements of particular armed bodies of troops. Instead, he takes a macro approach, describing the cumulative effect of a particular offensive, rather than attempting to parse its component parts.

When reading Keegan, I decried the lack of maps. Here, there are even less maps, and they are only nominally more helpful. But since Meyer doesn’t base his narrative on exhaustive recitations of the order of battle, more and better maps aren’t really required. In a book like this, for example, a competent presentation of the purpose of the Somme offensive (its strategic value; its tactical value; its psychological value) is far more important than a meticulous recounting of which regiment attacked across which farmer’s field.

I’m wary of overselling this book, simply because it came to me out of the blue, and since it enters a literary field studded with famous titles.

On the other hand, I don’t want to undersell it either.

A World Undone isn’t exactly Trench Warfare for Dummies. And even though I admittedly don’t know a whole lot about World War I, I do read a whole lot of history. This is a great primer on the subject. Most people can get through life without reading any books on the First World War. But if you want to read just one, and you want that experience to be painless, nay, to be enjoyable, I present to you this book, which comes with the completely worthless imprimatur of me, and the more worthless imprimatur of the History Channel.

Further, if you are one of those people who have had an awakening – if you have, like me, woken up and said to yourself, I must know everything about World War I – then this is a wonderful place to start, a book to help you get your footing. Having read this, and yes, John Keegan’s book as well, I feel like I have the roadmap to journey deeper into the cataclysm of the Great War.

That is, if I ever have the time, which I probably won’t. The only journey I’ll be taking will be into the cataclysm of diapers and not sleeping, but that is beside the point, and in no way is meant to compare babies to world wars.