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THE ORIGINS AND FIRST TWO YEARS OF THE GREAT WAR ARE METICULOUSLY RESEARCHED AND PRESENTED

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THE STORY OF THE FIRST WORLD WAR VOLUME 1

American Historian Gerald J. Meyer’s account of the start of World

War I has been released at a most auspicious moment, as the centenary of the armistice that ended the Great War draws near. This is the first of two volumes covering the 1914-1918 conflict.

Meyer’s first foray into the war, The World Remade, was the account of America’s epoch-defining involvement in the Great War. Now, in his scholarly yet entertaining style, Meyer offers the reader a story rich with fresh insights into the key issues, events and personalities of the period. He explains in rich detail what happened on that summer day in 1914, when a 19-year-old Serbian nationalist gunned down Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo. Meyer describes how the world slumbered while monumental forces were shaken across Europe. In less than a month, a combination of ambition, deceit, fear, jealousy, missed opportunities and miscalculation sent Austro-hungarian troops charging into Serbia, German soldiers streaming towards

Paris, and a vast Russian army marching into war, with Britain as its ally. As crowds cheered their armies on, no one could guess what lay ahead in World War I: four long years of slaughter, physical and moral exhaustion, and the near-collapse of a civilisation that until 1914 had dominated the globe.

The author has set himself a daunting task in attempting to unravel the complexities of the war as well as the events leading up to the conflict. Meyer himself acknowledges that some of the most compelling questions about the war have no certain answers and probably never will. Looking deeply and widely into the evidence, the standard answers to many questions seem to make less and less sense. Why did the apparently deadlocked conflict end in total victory for the Allies? Why were those in power unwilling to try to halt the bloodshed as the costs of continuing it threatened to bring down European civilisation? The frenzied rush to arms in 1914 is a reflection of Alexander Hamilton’s observation, “When the sword is once drawn, the passions of men observe no bounds of moderation.”

“The importance of the lessons of history,” Meyer states, “of learning from the mistakes of the past so as to have some chance of not repeating them, is so universally acknowledged as to sometimes seem a tiresome cliché.” This consideration was cast violently aside the day the shots rang out in Sarajevo.

This volume takes the reader through the first two calamitous years of the war, from Austria-hungary’s declaration of war on Serbia in mid-1914, to the German and Austro-hungarian invasion of Serbia, and Bulgaria and Serbia declaring war on one another in the closing weeks of 1915.

The problem, the author maintains, is that not all important questions about the Great War have indisputable answers. Meyer notes that “not everything we want to know is knowable”. For instance, he concedes there will never be agreement on just when in July 1914 it became inevitable that Britain, France and Russia on one side, Germany and Austria-hungary on the other, were all going to enter a conflict that none of them wanted and all of them feared. But the things that are knowable have been meticulously extracted from the author’s extensive research into archives and documents, some of which had hitherto not been brought to light.

‘WHEN THE SWORD IS ONCE DRAWN, THE PASSIONS OF MEN OBSERVE NO BOUNDS OF MODERATION”