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

“The war is unique in the number of questions about it that remain unsettled. Who caused it—if it can be said that anyone did? Should Germany have won it in 1914—and need Germany have lost it in 1918? Could it have ended earlier if only a few things had gone just a little differently at Gallipoli, or on the Marne, or at Ypres? Was Douglas Haig—or Erich Ludendorff, or Conrad von Hötzendorf—a great commander, or a disastrously bad one, or something in between? Could the conflict have been brought to a negotiated conclusion before it did so much damage to so much of the world? After ninety years, scholars remain divided on such questions. It seems likely that they always will.”
— A World Undone

One of the great difficulties I faced in reading about World War I is that I didn’t know where to start. I remember the first book that I encountered was Tuchman’s The Guns of August which you can easily find when you’re looking for a book on the subject. It is one of the few books on the Great War that has been translated to Persian and you can find it in most libraries in my country (I'd first seen it in my grandfather’s library and the hardcover along with the title caught my eye immediately but I have yet to read it back-to-back). The translation is good but Tuchman’s prose and style is difficult to capture in translation. But aside from the inevitable loss of clarity in translation, the thing that put me off the book was that I knew close to nothing about the war and Tuchman’s book deals only with the starting month of the war. I looked for a more comprehensive work but didn’t find anything to my liking.

Years passed and I only managed to see a few documentaries about the war. I searched online, read encyclopedias but only to the extent that I needed for World War II. What I’m trying to say is that it’s hard enough to get a good sense of the labyrinthine nature of the Great War even when you have a good book, let alone when you don’t know where and when to start.

G. J. Meyer has finally mitigated that problem for me. I’ve read A World Undone once, listened to it a few times and now I have more than a few paragraphs to bore people with if they ask me about the origins and the results of the war.

In terms of accessibility and abundance of background information, A World Undone is probably the best book that there is on this savage global conflict. Imperial powers of Europe clashed on a titanic scale, the destructiveness and ferocity of which shocked and reshaped the modern world.

Why did the conflict start? That’s the hardest question to answer because there is no simple and clear explanation. Causes were multitudinous and had to do with imperial vanity and the struggle for superiority over the continent (like the naval arms race between Germany and Britain). It had to do with Balkan nationalism, which Serbia was usually at its center. The tsarist Russia’s claim of being the protector of the Slavic population in the Balkans played a part in transforming a possible regional conflict into a continental one. And it has been said that even though none of the belligerents desired war, they preferred war to the disgrace that came with ‘looking weak’. Fear of losing status and being destroyed by a two front war also set the German leaders’ psyche so that they felt they had to attack first and fast if they were to avoid being crushed by Russia and France. And of course, it wasn’t inevitable. The assassination of the Archduke of Austria-Hungary by a Bosnian fanatic hit the fuse and the reactions and counteractions that followed, detonated the powder keg and the nations started to tear each other apart using the devastating powers of modern arms at their disposal.

Meyer addresses all of these in a straightforward way. I feel that he sometimes oversimplifies but the causes are so entangled that this simplification is necessary for an introductory work. Being a layman, I benefited a lot.

From the start my objective was to weave together all of the story’s most compelling elements—the strange way in which it began more than a month after the assassination that supposedly was its cause; the mysterious way in which the successes and failures of both sides balanced so perfectly as to produce years of bloody deadlock; the leading personalities; the astonishing extent to which the leadership of every belligerent nation was divided against itself; the appalling blunders; the incredible (and now largely forgotten) carnage—while at the same time filling in as much as possible of the historical background.

It has long seemed to me that practically all popular histories of the Great War assume too much, expect too much of the reader, and therefore leave too much unexplained.

Meyer nearly covers all the actions and fronts. There are good descriptions of the war on the Eastern Front and the famous battle of Tannenberg. The confused situation on the Western side is somewhat demystified by good maps with just enough detail. Tactical and strategic calculations are analyzed alongside short biographies of the decision makers.

At the end of each chapter, there is a background section which gives more information about the prewar status of the powers and these parts are especially beneficial if you’re like me and don’t know much about that period of history.

There wasn’t much progress on the battles of the Western Front and the overall situation that predominated there can be described as a terrible deadlock (not unlike the way heavy-weight wrestling matches usually turn out to be). Nothing decisive took place but the killing didn’t stop. France, Britain and Germany bled themselves dry without having much to show for it and it continued for far too long. Being a soldier (or a civilian) on that front has to count as one of the worst places to be on earth during the entirety of the twentieth century.

After more than four years of bloodshed and destruction, Russian armies were destroyed and the tsarist regime tumbled to its death. Austria-Hungary was gutted. Ottoman Empire ceased to exist and the modern Middle East began to take shape. Americans entered the war on the side of France and Britain and started to pound on the German west until the German government surrendered. Italy also played a ridiculous part and despite gaining a lot in the Treaty of Versailles, it didn’t fare well and succumbed to the rule of Benito Mussolini and his fascist followers. Meyer has you covered in all these, though I felt the quality of the book declined a bit towards the end.

Whatever else it did, the armistice did not end the killing. Life in Europe had become too deranged, too many things remained unsettled, and too many young men who knew nothing but war found that there was nothing for them to go home to, for that to be possible.
Russia proceeded almost seamlessly to an enormous civil war that would go on for years, kill more of its people than the Great War, draw in troops from western Europe and the United States, and end with the Communists in firm control. Just weeks after the armistice, an uprising aimed at establishing something like a Bolshevik regime in Germany erupted in Berlin and was bloodily suppressed not by the civil authorities but by rough paramilitary “Free Corps” made up of demobilized German soldiers unwilling to lay down their arms.

The most fateful consequence (in hindsight naturally) is the peace that befell the German Nation. Germany lost its imperial status and its overseas colonies and the Kaiser abdicated. An unsure democracy supplanted the ruling military junta that was under the control of Erich Ludendorff during the latter stages of the war. The new democratic Weimar Republic soon became unhinged and it didn’t survive the onslaught of ultranationalists. The stage was set for the Nazis and the bad-tempered corporal of the Great War to take the lead.