v
This book is a short interpretation of the First World War, a subject that has been written about by thousands of authors. The following section of this book makes suggestions for further reading, followed by a bibliography of works that I found most helpful in writing this book. The suggestions and bibliography offered here are not extensive. A very good and more substantial introductory bibliography may be found in John Morrow’s book, The Great War: An Imperial History. A comprehensive guide to reading and research may be found in Robin Higham’s Researching World War I. The best overview of how historians have interpreted the First World War is The Great War in History, coauthored by Jay Winter and Antoine Prost.
Suggestions for Further Reading
In recent years there have been a number of books written that provide good surveys of the war. The most readable is The First World War by John Keegan, who also provides many insights about how soldiers imagine and experience geography and landscape. A somewhat more academic and analytical approach is taken by Hew Strachan in his own survey history, The First World War, which is also highly recommended. Two other books—John Morrow’s The Great War and Michael Neiberg’s Fighting the Great War—also present balanced scholarship in readable prose, while paying more attention to global aspects of the war. Students who begin to develop a serious interest in the First World War should read David Stevenson’s Cataclysm, my personal favorite survey of the war. Stevenson’s book is longer than the others listed and it contains fewer colorful stories about the human experience of the war. Yet Stevenson writes well and he presents a superior, detailed, and nuanced overview of the war’s politics and economics. And, finally, the survey work that does the best job of introducing the excitement of interpreting and debating the war is Niall Ferguson’s The Pity of War. In this book, as in his other books, Ferguson excels at challenging the received wisdom of fellow historians.
After reading one of these introductory surveys, readers may wish to stoke their imaginations by watching films. There are two excellent video series about the First World War. One, called The Great War and the Shaping of the Twentieth Century, was conceived mainly by Jay Winter and Blaine Baggett and released in 1996. It is particularly insightful about the psychology of the people who experienced the war. Another excellent video series entitled The First World War was produced in 2004 by Jonathan Lewis. It is based on the survey book The First World War, by Hew Strachan, and adds much to it, not only by using standard archival footage of the war and interviews with experts, but also by presenting the landscapes of the war as they may be seen today, thereby linking the present to the past.
Documentary series are not the only ways to explore the visual side of the war. The war has been the subject of many feature films. In the interest of space and time I will recommend my personal favorites, all of which should be easy to locate. The Grand Illusion (1938) by Jean Renoir is the story of two French pilots, captured by the Germans, who join together in an effort to escape in spite of their different class backgrounds. The film raises questions about class loyalties and also about race—the pilots are joined in prison by a French Jew and a French African—while presenting war as senseless. A similar argument about war’s senselessness is made in Stanley Kubrick’s 1957 film Paths of Glory, which tells the story of French mutineers, some of whom are put on trial as examples to their comrades. Kubrick, like Renoir, shows soldiers who begin the war as willing participants and then change their minds when encountered with the evidence of the war’s perverse logic. The opposite approach is taken by Howard Hawks, the director of Sergeant York (1941). In this film, a backwoods American, Alvin York, is persuaded to abandon his pacifist idealism and participate in the war. He goes on to become an enthusiastic soldier and a hero, responsible for single-handedly capturing more than a hundred German soldiers. Howard Hawks hoped that York’s example would persuade isolationist Americans to participate in the Second World War, while his near-contemporary, Jean Renoir, used The Grand Illusion to urge his countrymen to avoid another world war. The conflict between duty and idealism, on the one hand, and war’s senselessness, on the other hand, is drawn out very well by Peter Weir in Gallipoli (1981), a movie about two Australian friends who are caught up in a senseless attack on Ottoman positions in the film’s final scene. Instead of resisting their orders, their entire unit goes “over the top” and is sacrificed. Finally, when the war becomes unbearably depressing, I recommend watching the Marx Brothers’ spoof of early twentieth-century diplomacy and war-making, the hilarious film entitled Duck Soup (1933). Groucho plays Rufus T. Firefly, the prime minister of “Freedonia” who starts and participates in a needless war against the neighboring country of “Sylvania.”
Comic and tragic films about the First World War have done much to support the interpretation that the war was a senseless slaughter. So have numerous works of fiction. Henri Barbusse’s Under Fire was written in the final years of the war and published in newspapers. It provides an unsparing account of the lives of French soldiers caught up in the terrible fighting along the Western Front. A German perspective is presented by Erich Maria Remarque in All Quiet on the Western Front (1928). Both books are famous indictments of warfare, as are the wartime poems of the British officers Robert Graves, Wilfred Owen, and Siegfried Sassoon, which have been collected in many anthologies. These poets feature prominently in one of the best works of historical fiction about the war, Regeneration (1993) by Pat Barker. In this novel, Barker explores the psychological traumas of war and their influences over the officers’ sense of duty. The most richly detailed historical fiction about the war, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s August 1914 (1972), analyzes the reasons for the Russian army’s failures during that fateful month, while providing rich characterizations of officers and men.
Bibliography
Arthur, Max. Forgotten Voices of the Great War: A History of World War I in the Words of the Men and Women Who Were There. Guilford, Conn.: Lyons Press, 2002.
———. Last Post: The Final Word from Our First World War Soldiers. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2005.
Audoin-Rouzeau, Stéphane, and Annette Becker. 14–18: Understanding the Great War. Trans. Catherine Temerson. New York: Hill and Wang, 2002.
Barbusse, Henri. Under Fire. Trans. Robin Buss. London: Penguin, 2003.
Barry, John M. The Great Influenza: The Epic Story of the Deadliest Plague in History. New York: Viking, 2004.
Bennett, Geoffrey. Naval Battles of the First World War. London: Batsford, 1968.
Bourke, Joanna. An Intimate History of Killing: Face-to-Face Killing in Twentieth-Century Warfare. New York: Basic Books, 1999.
Byerly, Carol R. Fever of War: The Influenza Epidemic in the U. S. Army during World War I. New York: New York University Press, 2005.
Chickering, Roger, and Stig Förster. Great War, Total War: Combat and Mobilization on the Western Front, 1914–1918. Washington D.C.: German Historical Institute; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000.
Churchill, Winston. The River War: An Account of the Reconquest of the Soudan. New York: Scribner’s, 1933.
Crosby, Alfred W. Epidemic and Peace, 1918. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1976.
Diamond, Jared. Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies. New York: Norton, 1999.
Dunn, J. C. The War the Infantry Knew, 1914–1919: A Chronicle of Service in France and Belgium. London: Abacus, 1994.
Edgerton, David. The Shock of the Old: Technology and Global History since 1900. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007.
Evans, Martin Marix. American Voices of World War I: Primary Source Documents, 1917–1920. Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborn Publishers, 2001.
Farwell, Byron. Armies of the Raj: From the Mutiny to Independence, 1858–1947. New York: Viking, 1989.
Ferguson, Niall. The Pity of War: Explaining World War I. London: Allen Lane, 1998.
Fewster, Kevin, Vecihi Başarın, and Hatice Hürmüz Başarın. Gallipoli: The Turkish Story. Crow’s Nest, N. S. W.: Allen and Unwin, 1985.
Finnegan, Terrence. Shooting the Front: Allied Aerial Reconnaissance and Photographic Interpretation on the Western Front—World War I. Washington, D.C.: National Defense Intelligence College, 2006.
Fischer, Fritz. Germany’s Aims in the First World War. New York: Norton, 1967.
———. War of Illusions: German Policies from 1911 to 1914. New York: Norton, 1975.
Forty, Simon. Historical Maps of World War I. New York: Sterling, 2002.
Fromkin, David. Europe’s Last Summer: Who Started the Great War in 1914? New York: Knopf, 2004.
Fussell, Paul. The Great War and Modern Memory. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975.
Gatrell, Peter. Russia’s First World War: A Social and Economic History. London: Pearson Longman, 2005.
Gilbert, Martin. The Routledge Atlas of the First World War. 2nd ed. London: Routledge, 1994.
Glover, Jon, and Jon Silkin, eds. The Penguin Book of First World War Prose. London: Penguin, 1989.
Grayzel, Susan. Women and the First World War. London: Pearson, 2002.
Hamilton, Jill. From Gallipoli to Gaza: The Desert Poets of World War One. East Rosedale, N.S.W.: Simon and Schuster, 2003.
Hamilton, Richard F., and Holger Herwig, eds. The Origins of World War I. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003.
Hannah, James, ed. The Great War Reader. College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2000.
Hardach, Gerd. The First World War, 1914–1918. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1977.
Herman, Judith. Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence—From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror. New York: Perseus Books, 1992.
Higham, Robin, ed., with Dennis Showalter. Researching World War I: A Handbook. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 2003.
Higonnet, Margaret, ed. Lines of Fire: Women Writers of World War I. New York: Plume, 1999.
Hyatt, A. M. J. General Sir Arthur Currie: A Military Biography. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1987.
James, Robert Rhodes. Gallipoli. London: Batsford, 1965.
Johnson, Hubert C. Breakthrough! Tactics, Technology, and the Search for Victory on the Western Front in World War I. Novato, Cal.: Presidio Press, 1994.
Joll, James. The Origins of the First World War. 2nd ed. London: Pearson, 1992.
Keegan, John. The First World War. New York: Knopf, 1999.
Keene, Jennifer. The United States and the First World War. London: Pearson, 2000.
Kilson, Robin W. “Calling up the Empire: The British Military Use of Non-Western Labor in France, 1916–1920.” Ph.D. diss., Harvard University, 1990.
Korte, Barbara, and Ann-Marie Einhaus, eds. The Penguin Book of First World War Stories. New York: Penguin, 2007.
Leed, Eric. No Man’s Land: Combat and Identity in World War I. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979.
Livesey, Anthony, with H. P. Willmott. The Historical Atlas of World War I. New York: Henry Holt, 1994.
MacDonald, Lyn. 1914–1919: Voices and Images of the Great War. London: Michael Joseph, 1988.
Macleod, Jenny. Reconsidering Gallipoli. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004.
Martel, Gordon. The Origins of the First World War. 3rd ed. London: Pearson Longman, 2003.
Mason, Philip. A Matter of Honour: An Account of the Indian Army, Its Officers and Men. London: Macmillan, 1974.
Massie, Robert K. Castles of Steel: Britain, Germany, and the Winning of the Great War at Sea. New York: Random House, 2003.
———. Dreadnought: Britain, Germany, and the Coming of the Great War. New York: Random House, 1991.
McCarthy, Justin. The Ottoman Peoples and the End of Empire. London: Arnold, 2001.
Metcalf, Thomas R. Imperial Connections: India in the Indian Ocean Arena, 1860–1920. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2007.
Mommsen, Wolfgang J. Imperial Germany, 1867–1918: Politics, Culture, and Society in an Authoritarian State. London: Arnold, 1995.
Morrow, John H. German Air Power in World War I. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1982.
———. The Great War: An Imperial History. London: Routledge, 2004.
———. The Great War in the Air: Military Aviation from 1909 to 1921. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian, 1993.
Neiberg, Michael S. Fighting the Great War: A Global History. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2005.
———, ed. The World War I Reader: Primary and Secondary Sources. New York: New York University Press, 2007.
Offer, Avner. The First World War: An Agrarian Interpretation. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998.
Omissi, David E. Sepoy and the Raj: Politics of the Indian Army 1860–1940. New York: Macmillan, 1998.
Page, Melvin E. Africa and the First World War. London: Macmillan, 1987.
———. The Chiwaya War: Malawians and the First World War. Boulder, Col.: Westview, 2000.
Palazzo, Albert. Seeking Victory on the Western Front: The British Army and Chemical Warfare in World War I. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2000.
Palmer, Svetlana, and Sarah Wallis, eds. Intimate Voices from the First World War. London: Simon and Schuster, 2003.
Prior, Robin, and Trevor Wilson. The Somme. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005.
Reeves, Nicholas. The Power of Film Propaganda: Myth or Reality? London: Cassell, 1999.
Remarque, Erich Maria. All Quiet on the Western Front. Trans. A. W. Wheen. New York: Fawcett, 1958.
Robertson, Linda R. The Dream of Civilized Warfare: World War I Flying Aces and the American Imagination. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003.
Rose, Lisle A. Power at Sea: The Age of Navalism, 1890–1918. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2007.
Russell, Edmund. War and Nature: Fighting Humans and Insects with Chemicals from World War I to “Silent Spring.” Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001.
Sheffield, Gary, ed. War on the Western Front: In the Trenches of World War I. Oxford: Osprey Publishing, 2007.
Showalter, Dennis E. Tannenberg: Clash of Empires. Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1991.
Silkin, Jon, ed. The Penguin Book of First World War Poetry. London: Penguin, 1979.
Smith, Leonard V., Stéphane Audoin-Rouzeau, and Annette Becker. France and the Great War, 1914–1918. Trans. Helen McPhail. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003.
Stevenson, David. Cataclysm: The First World War as Political Tragedy. New York: Basic, 2004.
Stone, Norman. The Eastern Front, 1914–1917. New York: Scribner, 1975.
Strachan, Hew. The First World War. New York: Viking, 2003.
———. The First World War in Africa. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004.
———. The Oxford Illustrated History of the First World War. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998.
Tipton, Frank B. A History of Modern Germany since 1815. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2003.
Travers, Tim. Gallipoli 1915. Stroud, Gloucs.: Tempus Publishing, 2001.
Tucker, Richard P., and Edmund Russell, eds. Natural Enemy, Natural Ally: Toward an Environmental History of War. Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 2004.
Watkins, Glenn. Proof through the Night: Music and the Great War. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2003.
Williamson, Samuel R., and Russel Van Wyk. July 1914: Soldiers, Statesmen, and the Coming of the Great War: A Brief Documentary History. Boston: Bedford St. Martin’s, 2003.
Winter, Jay. Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995.
Winter, Jay, and Antoine Prost. The Great War in History: Debates and Controversies, 1914 to the Present. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005.
Winters, Harold A., et al. Battling the Elements: Weather and Terrain in the Conduct of War. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998.