1) One shouldn't read compact one volume surveys of epic events. It is safe to assume that The First World War meets the criteria of epic event. Any single volume will only distort and compact events. This was no exception

2) John Keegan is vastly overrated as a writer and scholar. I think the latter was accidental. People projected authority, with his sober demeanor, who can blame them? Keegan routinely employs clumsy metaphors and speaks of terrifying events in terms of inefficiency. He also resorts to unflattering stereotypes which detract. Keegan uses little primary sources, instead he mines Alistair Horne's book on Verdun and similar secondary texts.

3)Daniel Haig is lambasted as the autistic author of the slaughter at the Somme. Keegan may be guilty of similar callousness though he is constantly reminding the reader of late 20th Century outcomes of nations and regions.

3.1) This is an interesting adaptation of the former. Keegan does point out the Great War activities of WWII leaders and innovators.

This is not a terrible book, nor one of questionable erudition. It is a survey and if one wants the barest of narratives arcs, one could possibly do far worse.

Incredibly sad book. Good general overview of the war, though not too many hot takes or analyses of strategy/politics/causes.

To me, the greatest mystery of the war is how the British soldiers kept up their fighting spirit thru 4 YEARS of trench warfare, knowing they had a >50% chance of dying, most likely in some pointless offensive across no man’s land that would yield no results— when they weren’t defending their homeland, or fighting for national glory, but just there bc they were duty-bound to help out the French. Even the French soldiers, who were fighting to take back their own homeland, had a bit of a mutiny; the British didn’t.

Some other things that struck a chord emotionally:
- In WWI, the tank was just being invented. And then just a few decades later, in WWII, we roll out the atomic bomb lol
- Not so long ago, even Western democracies’ territorial integrity and security depended in large part on how many young men they could send to their borders. And ofc those young men had to, at a moment’s notice, be ready and willing to become pawns & let their lives become completely dispensable in the hands of the state.
- People liken running a company to fighting a war, which is fair in some ways. But no executive has to regularly send hundreds of thousands of their employees to their deaths in a single strategic initiative. If running a company is considered a Hard Thing… well, yeah, it’s interesting to think about what sorts of characters end up able to psychologically survive 4 years of war leadership

The First World War by John Keegan is an excellent one-volume treatment of the Great War. I read this book because I felt my knowledge of World War I left much to be desired. I wanted to get a good understanding of the entire conflict before diving in to more specific battles, campaigns, and other events. That's exactly what this book offered.

The opening chapters describe the background to the hostilities and the buildup of the tragic chain of events which launched Europe, and shortly thereafter the entire world, into catastrophe. I noticed some reviewers thought this section dry and hard to read, but I found it readable enough. In particular, I found Keegan's analysis of the power of mobilization, a power entirely unknown to politicians and governments, to be extremely interesting and necessary for understanding the conflict's sudden eruption.

Once he gets to the military affairs, Keegan is in his element. Occasionally, he gets bogged down in the movement of army corps and divisions, but these lapses don't seriously detract from the books readability. Indeed, covering such a vast amount of material in a little over 400 pages prevents Keegan from diving too in-depth. There are times, when making observations or remarks, that Keegan displays beautiful language and insight. There were many eloquent and poignant sentences and paragraphs sprinkled throughout to contrast the mundane "corps XX rendezvoused with the third division..." text.

The book is split into ten chapters, the last seven of which cover the battles. Generally, these chapters focus on a certain front or theme, which means there is some chronological overlap. I liked this strategy though, because instead of constantly jumping around, you're able to become familiar with the characters and events of a certain region. I also appreciated Keegan's coverage of events outside of the Western and Eastern Fronts. He provides valuable summaries of the colonial wars in Africa, the campaigns in the Middle East and Caucasus, and the buildup to the Russian Civil War. Of course, most of the time is spent in Europe, naturally, but these sections were important because I for one had never known about the colonial conflicts and the battles in the Caucasus.

As far as the 15 maps go, they are adequate. Most of them focus on specific battles or campaigns, though the overleaf of the western front was invaluable as a reference. Their main drawback is their lack of color, which makes it difficult to distinguish sides occasionally.

It is with confidence that I can recommend this book as an excellent, balanced overview of World War I. The general reader may find the book too focused on military aspects of the war, but those looking for a military history of the war should find this book a great read.

A solid effort. Keegan does a pretty good job of covering an immense subject. He proceeds smoothly from the background to the causes to the war years themselves, structuring his narrative for the most part chronologically but diverging when it makes sense (such as in his examination of the naval dimension of the war). If you are looking for a single volume history of the First World War, this would be a good choice.

That said, the book is not perfect. Individual offensives and counter-offensives are at times described in more detail than appropriate for an overview book. The maps are inadequate -- failing to show many of the important places referred to in the text and almost completely lacking in terrain indications (it is frustrating to continually read about how an army was constrained by mountains on one side and water on the other... and not to be able to recognize either on the map). Perhaps most worrying are errors in the statistics quoted... because if you get such simple things wrong as the percentage of Germans of military age who were killed (he says 3.5% when in reality it was closer to 10%), then what else have you gotten wrong? Lastly, the analysis of the aftermath is too short, IMHO.

Nevertheless on balance the book's strengths well outweigh its weaknesses, and, given the crucial importance of the Great War for an understanding of the subsequent events of the 20th Century, I would not hesitate to recommend it.

It was quite a war.

The first section of this book is damned awesome. Keegan lays out the social, industrial, economic, military, political, colonial, diplomatic, cultural, and even aesthetic, forces that led to the cataclysmic conflict: a war that everyone rushed toward inevitably with heedless glee; a six-week walk in the park -- so they thought -- that soon turned out to be anything but. Seeing monarchs trade their usual finery for photo ops in military uniforms, and even something as simple as a cool button on one's own military attire was enough to make an impressionable kid want to join in the romantic fun. Militarism was a growing part of daily civilian life, and the slow inculcation of the glories of battle into the mass mind was no sillier than people raiding the US Capitol today because they chose to believe a con man's big lies or because some idiotic fan fiction from 4chan, eg. Q-anon, told them so.

The dashing cavalry charge, the decisive encirclement, the elegant certainty of the Schlieffen Plan -- all these naive dreams of quick victory died in the muddy trenches and poison-soaked lungs of suffocating, blinded and miserable soldiers.

After that, the book compresses -- by necessity, admittedly -- a litany of events with the rapidity of someone trying to churn out a college blue book essay because there's only ten minutes left on the clock. I'm reminded of an old anecdote that the conductor George Szell once told of seeing Richard Strauss conducting a symphony in a leisurely manner until he looked at his watch and realized he was going to miss a card game, causing him to maniacally wave his baton tempo molto allegro to get it all over with.

The fact is, this is my first full-fledged WWI overview read. The question is, therefore: Is this a good first book for the neophyte? Yes, it is, because at the very least it gave me a clear rundown and a baseline for further exploration, and for that I found it valuable. Places and names like Ypres and the Marne and the Somme now mean something to me, in their context, and I have some idea who the combatants were and why the battles were significant. That said, Keegan, for all his expertise and occasional thoughtful insight and brilliance at cross-referencing, is not the most scintillating of storytellers. He's not an "on-the-ground" guy; rather more like a guy watching it all go down from the heights of Mt. Olympus. He falls somewhere between the dry academic and the more novelistic war writers, which is not a bad place to be, but the result is not the stuff that overwhelms the imagination, as one might yearn for with events this epic and terrifying. I do tend to want a more novelistic sweep in books covering titanic events like this. Nevertheless, I can see why Keegan is respected as a military expert but can also see why he's come in for some criticism.

Keegan appears to be in the camp that believes World War II is the second part of World War I, or, that World War I is the first part of World War II. The historical argument is well taken and credible. Considering that Hitler was there in the trenches, wounded, and loving every minute of it, and eager to get everybody in on the fun for another round two decades later makes perfect, absurd sense.

The upshot is that this is a good book. I enjoyed it, even if I wasn't bowled over by it. I respect those who've given it five stars, and equally understand why some have rated it less highly. As a "dive-in" book, I think it's just about as good as any to delve into this subject.

In any case, there's already a very fine and detailed review of this book here on Goodreads, penned with care, insight and detail by my GR friend, Matt, whose review I agree with almost entirely, and here it is to behold. No need for me to reinvent his wheel:
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

KR@KY 2021

I was expecting this to be a rather dry and technically written book but I was surprised how engaged I became reading thru out this book that describes not only how the Great War got started but also how it ended. This is a recommended book for anyone who has an interest in our first World War. The author gives vivid details on the regional fighting and what was at stake.

I definitely liked this book. A very good overview of WWI. I am disappointed about the campaigns in the Middel East. Very little is discussed on Palestine or Kut.

My boss lent this book to me. He loves military history and loves to share with other people books that he really likes. I'm interested in the WWI era, so I enjoyed this book. It was well-written for a military history. For me, it was a good review of things I already knew about WWI, and I also learned some things I didn't know. I was very fuzzy on the eastern front, on why WWI was truly called a World War, but now I understand these things. But there is nothing that can make WWI any less appalling. Really: all that carnage over one crazy Serb who murdered one prince.
My only complaint about this book was that the maps didn't align with the text. I have a lot of trouble picturing battles just from reading text and have to refer to maps a LOT. The maps in this book were scanty and did not coincide with the text.

Such an excellent historical account. It provides social, political and economical context throughout all the years of the war and covers all the major battles and strategies in great detail. Sometimes a little too much detail if you ask me, I didn't really find any value in hearing exactly how many machine guns were involved at one point or another in the conflict.

What I appreciate the most in the book however is its humanism. How men carrying 30kg of equipment through knee deep mud, unslept and fed rations, assaulting enemies by charging at their fortified positions under the protection of nothing but the cotton uniform on their bodies is so staggering and so sorrowful that seeking an understanding is all the more difficult.

The only point I really did not like or agree with was Keegan pinning the Kaiser's naval ambitions as a key factor in igniting the war. At a time when imperialism and the colonies were such a source of wealth and power (the tiny Belgium had the World's 6th economy) it just feels like the sort of argument an English writer would make, all the while England had the world's largest navies and was the economical center of the world through the trade and power they provided.

Once again John Keegan has produced another well written and researched book to add to his growing number of titles. This is an excellent one volume account of the Great War which the novice or experienced reader will enjoy. I found the first few chapters a bit dry but once the author moved into the sections covering the fighting the book moved along smartly.

The author covers all theatres of the war and covered those naval and aviation aspects that had bearing on the war as a whole. There were a number of excellent general maps and numerous black & white photographs to assist the reader to follow the narrative.

Overall a great book to read and well worth the time to sit down and enjoy.

Keegan is a master historian, and I see why many consider him the best military historian of our time. What a sobering book. An unnecessary war, one that could have been stopped at numerous junctures, fought using outdated tactics, leads to a punitive peace that paves the way for Hitler and the Second World War. If you enjoy history, especially the history of the twentieth century, you must read this. One could argue, and Keegan suggests it, that 1914-1918 were the most significant years of the century. Certainly, one cannot understand the remainder of the century without understanding these years.

The Versailles Treaty's role in causing the Second World War is well known. It is also well known that the antagonism between the Soviet Union and the West largely arises from the support given by the Allies to the White Russians during the Russian Civil War. I did not understand, however, that the Allies gave that support because they desperately needed additional troops to fight in France, and Czech prisoners of war released by Russia had committed to join the war in the West. The clash between the Czechs and the soviets led to the Allies effectively taking a side in the Russian Civil War, but not out of any pre-existing animus towards the Bolsheviks. The British and French desperately needed additional soliders on the western front to counter the divisions the Germans were able to shift from east to west after the collapse of Russia. Of course, the Bolsheviks never forgot and never forgave, leading to a century of distrust between east and west. Does a Soviet Russia not estranged from Britain, France, and the United states ally with Hitler at the beginning of the Second World War?

Thought-proviking, educational, and well-written. Well worth the time.