Journalist Presents Readable Summary Of Great War

By David Walton
Sunday, July 23, 2006

FOR THE TRIBUNE-REVIEW

"A World Undone: The Story of the Great War, 1914 to 1918," by G.J.
Meyer. Delacorte Press, $28.

G.J. Meyer, whose byline covers a long list of subjects and
publications, is more journalist than historian, and his "A World
Undone: The Story of the Great War, 1914 to 1918" is a comprehensive
history aimed at the general reader. Its virtues are readability,
objectivity and command of narrative. It is one of probably an unending
series of books attempting to tell the whole story of World War I in
one book.

But Meyer doesn’t try to have the last word. I read his book recovering
from shoulder cuff surgery, and while I wouldn’t recommend the synergy
of the experience for every reader, it more than held my interest
throughout. You finish this book feeling you’ve learned everything
anyone reasonably needs to know about The Great War.

Every decade, we learn anew the profound effects of that war’s
unfinished conflicts and problematic settlements — today in Iraq
and the Middle East. An understanding of the war, and especially of
the nationalistic and ethnic rivalries that fueled it, is essential
to understanding the modern world.

Meyer organizes his book chronologically, and accompanies each chapter
with a short background essay — on Europe’s ruling families and
military commanders, on the war’s principal weaponry, on corollary
topics such as the Turks’ murder of their Armenian minority, on
Lawrence of Arabia, on the war and poetry. The battle of Verdun
is accompanied by a capsule history of the military importance of
the site.

In theory, you could skip these background sections, but you won’t.
This is one of those books where you read every page.

Meyer’s book has the very best qualities for this kind of comprehensive
approach: a gift for compression and an eye for the telling detail. His
theme is what this most terrible of wars, stripped to its essentials,
offers as its lessons — blunders and endless bad luck and misjudgment
on all sides, "blindness and loss of perspective," and what Meyer calls
"the strange dark poetry of The Great War." (154)

Only a comprehensive account of "the killing machine" that claimed
so many million lives can convey the scale of tragedy the war became
for a whole society, in nation after nation.

Describing one fruitless action by the British Gen. Douglas Haig in
1914, one of the war’s few breakthroughs and one of its many missed
opportunities, Meyer writes:

"His gains included little beyond the ghost town of Neuve Chapelle.
He had lost 11,600 men, the Germans 8,600 — the numbers being mere
abstractions that, as always, veil thousands of stories of lives lost
and ruined." (240-41)

Why did the war go on for so many months and years of stalemate,
with no gains and millions dead and mutilated in its endless failed
offensives? The answer is succinct, and requires only two sentences:

"None of the warring governments thought they could possibly
accept a settlement in which they did not win something that would
justify all the deaths. The war had become self-perpetuating and
self-justifying." (192)

David Walton, who teaches at the University of Pittsburgh in Oakland,
is the author of "Ride" and winner of the Flannery O’Connor Award
for his short-story collection "Evening Out."