When I first read Barbara Tuchman’s The Guns of August in the autumn of 1963 it was as though history went from black and white to Technicolor. I was in my second year of history at the University of Toronto. It was a very strong department and I shall always be grateful for the education I received there, but so many of the textbooks seemed to drain any life out of the past. The subject, too, in those days was quite narrowly conceived. We did a lot of political history, whether the endless struggles between the provinces and the federal government in Canada or the growth of parliamentary government in Britain. When we did the Tudors and Stuarts, we read constitutional documents and learned more about the divine right of kings than we did about what was going on in society.
As a child I had loved history because it showed so many alternative worlds. I still remember with gratitude a series for children on everyday life where we learned about the games children in other times had played and the food they ate. I read Our Island Story – yes, I know how politically incorrect it is – but I loved the stories of Boadicea, as she was still called, dashing about in her chariot, or an absent-minded King Alfred burning the cakes. I did projects on Champlain coming up the St Lawrence river and on Henry Hudson cast adrift in the bay that now bears his name. And I read dozens of historical novels: Rosemary Sutcliff on Roman Britain and GA Henty on British heroes, though my all-time favourite was Ronald Welch’s Knight Crusader. (I read it again the other day, and to my relief it stands up very well.)
The Guns of August reads like a novel but it was history, firmly based on the evidence. As Tuchman herself always said, she would not do the “He or she must have thought or felt”. It is a long book, but I was gripped from her wonderful first sentence. “So gorgeous was the spectacle on the May morning of 1910 when nine kings rode in the funeral of Edward VII of England that the crowd, waiting in hushed and black-clad awe, could not keep back gasps of admiration.” She paints the procession, the rows of heirs apparent, queens, empresses and princes, the scarlet, blue, green and purple uniforms, the gold braid and magnificent orders, the plumes flying on helmets. “The sun of the old world was setting in a dying blaze of splendour never to be seen again.”
Throughout the book you are aware of her ability to bring the past to life, in part using what she called the corroborative detail. It is hard to forget Talaat Bey, one of the Young Turks, after reading that his favourite meal was a pound of caviar, accompanied by glasses of brandy and a bottle of champagne. She is also a wonderful storyteller, as step by step she goes from the tensions that culminate in the outbreak of the war to the first crucial battles that led to the stalemate of the western front and the inconclusive struggle in the east. “The writer’s object,” she once said in a lecture, “should be to hold the reader’s attention. I want the reader to turn the page and keep on turning until the end.” And she does and you do.
I loved her acerbic wit. Asquith’s innermost mind was “a region difficult to penetrate under the best of circumstances”; Austria-Hungary was determined to wage war on Serbia “with the bellicose frivolity of senile empires”. I admired, too, the sharp character sketches. Joseph Joffre, the French commander-in-chief, “looked like Santa Claus and gave an impression of benevolence and naivety – two qualities not noticeably part of his character”. His German counterpart, Von Moltke, was full of self-doubt, weighed down by the burden of bearing the name of his uncle, who had been the hero of the wars of German unification. The natty serial adulterer Sir John French, who commanded the British Expeditionary Force to France, is shown dithering as the Germans advance southwards.
I was also impressed that a woman was writing military history, a field that was then almost exclusively male – and writing it in a way that far surpassed the detailed studies that had much about the calibre of guns and the movements of a regiment, but little about what it was like to be on a battlefield. Suddenly here was someone who gave a sense of the dust and the sweat in that hot August of 1914. You can see the long lines of Germans plodding down towards Paris through Belgium and northern France and the pathetic refugees with their possessions piled on carts and wheelbarrows. She describes the smell that lay over the ruined towns and villages of Belgium, “blood and medicine and horse manure and dead bodies”.
She is prone at times to absurd overstatements, for example that the German people were gripped by the idea that divine providence had destined them to be masters of the universe. Her view that the Germans somehow wanted to impose their culture on the world is surely a reflection of that great ideological struggle of her own time between the west and the Soviet bloc. Moreover, her main argument that entangling alliances and rigid military timetables caught Europe in a grip that led the powers inexorably towards catastrophe is no longer accepted by most historians. Indeed, as she was finishing her book, the German historian Fritz Fischer brought out his own in which he argued that the war had been deliberately brought about by Germany in an attempt to dominate Europe. He, too, has been challenged and the argument goes on.
Still, when I was writing my own book on the outbreak of the war, I chose not to re-read the Guns of August just in case I fell under the influence of her interpretation again. Now I have gone back to it and read it with much of the same pleasure of 50 years ago. And I remember why I thought then that this is how I would like to write.
