Keegan manages a reasonable, if uninspired account of the First World War.

The First World War is the third John Keegan history I have read, and I am definitely getting the sense that there's a bit of smoke and mirrors behind this gentleman's reputation as a great popular historian. In my opinion, a popular history need not contribute any novel scholarship to a subject, but should be informative, clear, and personally engaging. When writing about a subject as broad and profound as a war, I expect the writer to break down information into overarching strategy and politics, and to explore the personal experiences of common soldiers and civilians, while also touching on cultural themes, technology, etc. to paint a reasonably comprehensive overview sketch of the conflict. Keegan doesn't entirely succeed on any of these levels in The First World War, instead offering up an unevenly paced, inconsistent, and at times, confusing overview, which gets across the main ideas reasonably, but offers little to engage the reader.

In the introductory section of the book (the lead-in to the war) Keegan shows off his odd penchant for emphasizing micro detail in some places while leaving out and dashing through overview discussion in others. The lead-up to the declarations of war, he paints in great detail, including anecdotes about various political leaders having been on holiday, and Tsar Nicholas II's fears about his son's health, etc. However, the discussion of underlying causes and the nature of globalized economics, the tension between empires and representative governments, the naval issues between the UK and Germany, the conflict over colonies and the slow shift away from autarky—all of these issues are given fluffy treatment. He discusses the celebratory tone of many of the soldiers on the eve of war, but gives very little context. Now, I know he's primarily a military historian, but the personal political details he provides lie somewhat outside the scope of his professed expertise, while the big-picture political and cultural dimensions are crucial for a comprehensive understanding of the war...

During the 1914 offensives, Keegan sometimes gets lost in the weeds, describing specific engagements in terms of units designations (for which the book provides no clarifying maps), without offering sufficient explanation or description for the reader to fully follow the text. I would have expected more personal details from a popular history as well—primary source accounts from soldiers, civilians in Belgium and Paris—the rich, narrative stuff that stands out in memory and engages the transporting imagination. We get precious little of this. Moreover, by the conclusion of 1914, Keegan has used up about 40 percent of his page allotment, obliging a lot of hurried writing and condensing for subsequent events.

The same weaknesses permeate the rest of the book—odd super focus on specific events, such as the Gallipoli campaign and the experience of the Australians, and fluffing of other significant events, such as the German and Austrian home front famine, or the experience of Italian soldiers on the Isonzo.

I think Keegan does a reasonable job laying in the military events of the First World War—I don't think he gets many important details wrong, as he did later in his history of the American Civil War (although, admittedly, I know that war better and am therefore more able to judge), but his overall lack of focus and organization consistently leaves events confusing and choppy. This clears up a bit near the end of the book, where I found Keegan's description of the 1918 Ludendorf offensives to be lucid and insightful, but it remains a problem through much of the book.

The real issue with this history, though, is the lack of engaging personal voices from combatants, officers, and politicians, and the virtual total lack of description of anything on the home fronts. Keegan offers up absolutely no information on medicine, nursing, and medical science. I know there must have been significant advances during the war, and I am very curious to learn about women doctors, the safety of nurses, how automobiles may have impacted stretcher teams... There is very little description of the hunger on home front (as mentioned above) or how rations impacted health and everyday life. There's no discussion of how Britain and France held elections during the war, and whether peace protests were ever an issue. There's only passing mention of the Spanish Influenza...

Reading The First World War, therefore, I was left with the impression that Keegan was offering up a reasonably readable, but essentially bland, "great white man" history of the war. Moreover, Keegan seems to take a very narrow, pessimistic perspective of the outcome of the war, essentially viewing it as a lead up to the Second World War. This seems intuitively wrong to me. The First World War destroyed the Guilded Age world order, leaving a lot of chaos in its wake. Subsequent events and the decisions of major players and states led to the Second World War, but the outbreak of that conflict was far from inevitable, and the geopolitics of the interwar years were extremely complex and interesting. So... it feels like Keegan doesn't really draw thoughtful or thought-provoking conclusions from the history he relates either.

In sum, Keegan's First World War is a disappointing read. It is a competent military account of the conflict, but little more. I can't immediately recommend a better survey of World War One, but there are so many out there, I'm sure there must be one that is more comprehensive and engaging than this one. This is the second subpar Keegan history I have read, and though it is not nearly as bad as his American Civil War book, I have the sense that he is not the strong, must-read popular historian that his reputation suggests and that readers would do well to look elsewhere.

If you want a broad overview of the Great War, this is a good choice.

Sir John Keegan's work on the First World War is both an extremely well written, narrative account of the war, while all the while being a work that doesn't truly add anything new to the understanding of the conflict. As other reviewers have said, it is, largely, a rehash of secondary source material, with Keegan preferring to narrate the war rather than truly analyze it. 
Nothing at all wrong with such an approach, most works of this type tend to be amongst the best of historical works, and tend to stand the test of time far better than more analytical, or polemical, tomes.
Keegan's book begins with a brief look at the European dominated world from the late 19th century, to the first decade of the 20th. It is a world of high civilization, high culture, high art, and incredible wealth through global commerce. It was also a world of incredible degeneracy, sin, and boiling anarchy and revolution simmering beneath the surface. It was also, in many respects, a new world thrust into a new order that simply could not last. 
Germany, born as an Empire in the fires of warfare from 1864 to 1871, dominated the continent. Their brilliant Chancellor, Otto von Bismarck, set Germany up as the continental hegemon, in a way, the office of the European Customs Union. Germany, Busmarck said, wouldn't need an overseas empire as Europe was her empire. 
The world order founded upon German hegemony on the continent would only last for four decades, and while Keegan does not lay all the blame for the coming tragedy at Germany's feet, he feels that a large portion of it does. Especially once Wilhelm II took over as Kaiser, and replaced Bismarckian mandates with strategic flights of fancy such as Weltpolitik (or world influence), or the building of a High Seas Fleet to directly challenge the Naval hegemony of the Royal Navy. 
There was more blame to go around, however. 
France sought to regain territory lost to Germany in 1871, and to restore their place as continental hegemon. 
Russia sought a unified Pan Slavic Alliance, which sent tremors of ethnic discontent into the Balkans and the fractious Austro-Hungarian Empire. 
The Ottomans sought modernization at German hands, and to restore some of their long lost luster and respect. 
The Hapsburg Empire looked to stamp out the rising tide of Slavic nationalism sweeping their territories, and saw in the Kingdom of Serbia the personification of all their fears. 
The Serbs looked to aggrandize themselves in any way possible, and were stoking the fires of ethnic discontent in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. 
The British sought a tighter grip on their overseas Imperial holdings, and their own self righteous view of themselves, mirrored by their disdain over the sins of other Imperial powers, failed to cover up their own. 
The Italians looked to gain their own Empire.
Out of all the future major players in the coming conflict, only the Americans were relatively free of blame; a world away, aggrandizing themselves in the name of the Monroe Doctrine in Latin America, and in the Philippines. 
When the fuse was lit in Sarejevo in the summer of 1914 by Serbian backed Bosnian terrorists, the world that was, the world of Kings and Queens, Emperor's, Sultans, and the Church, of high art and literature, of ceaseless intellectual advancement, and innocent progress towards a form of Monarchical utopia, was doomed. 
What replaced it, even now with the fall of the Soviet Empire, the ascension of the American Imperium, global democracy, and freedom of speech for all, still seems lesser, duller, and uglier than that which was so brutally murdered beginning in the late summer of 1914. 
Keegan's narrative of the war itself is uneven. As one may expect from a British author, he focuses on the British participation in the war. While this means that British operations on the Western Front take primacy, the French take a secondary stance in the narrative, as do the Germans, while the Eastern Front, arguably the crucial Front of the war, gets short shrift. The African Theater gets a surprising amount of page space (which is fine as the story of Paul Lettow von Vorbeck is akin to that of Stonewall Jackson), as does the Japanese conquest of the German Imperial holdings in Asia. 
However, the Naval conflict is spottily told at best, with the Falklands and Jutland being the most focused upon events. Such luminaries in the Naval history of the War such as Germany's Operation Albion in the Baltic against the Russians is ignored entirely. The air war is mentioned in passing, as is the Middle Eastern Theater, except for Gallipoli which is the only Middle Eastern encounter told with anything longer than a paragraph. The fighting in the Caucasus with Russia and the Ottomans is mentioned in passing a couple of times, never expounded upon, the Salonika Front is ignored almost entirely, as is the 1915 Central Powers conquest of Serbia, or anything Balkan (including Greece's entry into the war). 
Despite all of that, one can get a good, beginning, picture of the war from reading Sir John Keegan's work.
While he focuses on the Western Front, one can learn enough to form a skeletal arrangement of the war as a whole.
In 1914 the main action was kicked off by the Hapsburg invasion of Serbia, as well as an offensive against the Russians into Galicia. The Germans staked all on a sweeping strategic envelopement of the French, centered upon Paris, while the Russians invaded East Prussia, and likewise Hapsburg Galicia following the defeat of the initial Austro-Hungarian push. And the French charged headlong into a meat grinder in Alsace and Lorraine. 
In the West, the French were all but wiped out in their initial offensives into Germany, and the Germans rapidly overran most of Belgium and much of northern France before the recovering French defeated them at the Marne River, outside Paris. The British joined the French in trying to push the Germans back out of France, but were soundly defeated along the Aisne River. Both sides tried to outflank the other via operational movement towards the northern Channel ports. This lead to the bloodbath that was First Ypres and the beginning of a stalemate that would last the majority of the war. 
In the East, the Hapsburg forces were thrashed not once, but twice by the Serbs, and used to mop the floor with by the Russians. The Russians, however, met disaster in East Prussia where the Germans won the greatest victory of the War at Tannenberg, and another at the Masurian Lakes. 
The Germans were forced to aid their Austro-Hungarian allies by sending forces to shore up the cracking Hapsburg forces in the Carpathian mountains, while a series of offensives by the Germans and Russians ended in stalemate in central Poland by years end. 
Ottoman entry into the war was rapidly checked by a swift defeat along the Nile River, and a tragedy in the Caucasus where an outnumbered Russian force annihilated a Turkish force suffering from the harsh elements. 
In 1915, the West remained locked in blood soaked deadlock, with the story largely being the French beating their heads against the German wall, while the Germans used poison gas on the British at 2nd Ypres, and the British returned the favor at Loos. 
In the East, the Germans and Austro-Hungarians, under German leadership, swept the Russians before them in a series of crushing offensives that retook Hapsburg land taken by the Czar's armies in 1914, penetrated into Russian Galicia, and took all of Poland, and much of the Baltic away from the Russians. 
The Italians decided to join in, and were promptly mowed down in droves along the Isonzo...numerous times. 
The Serbs were overwhelmed by a joint German-Hapsburg-Bulgarian offensive that conquered nearly the whole kingdom, forcing the British and French to send emergency forces to Salonika to keep the Serbian remnant alive (and subsequently to be ignored entirely by Keegan in his narrative). 
The British invaded Mesopotamia, and the British and French landed on Gallipoli, but were soundly defeated in a long, brutal slugging match. 
Paul Lettow von Vorbeck wrote the book on modern guerrilla warfare in German East Africa, and cemented his place in the annals of military history by routinely confounding, and defeating, an Allied force (made up mainly of native African troops) of British, Belgian, Boer, and Portuguese contingents, with his own native Askari rifleman. 
1916 saw the year of great, titanic battles. Verdun and the Somme in the Western Front. Both managing to wear the Germans down via attrition, but being unable to break the deadlock. The Ottomans won a major success in Mesopotamia against the British-Indian forces at Kut al Amara, though this was offset by the Arab Revolt against Ottoman rule which got into full swing that year (and barely mentioned in Keegan's narrative). The Russians continued to push the Ottomans out of the Caucasus and into Asia Minor proper. 
Marshall Alexei Brusilov showcased what a recovered, and reformed, Russian Army could do by nearly knocking the Austro-Hungarian Empire out of the war in a brilliantly conducted offensive. All the while the Habsburgs conducted a strategically meaningless offensive in northern Italy that petered out within a couple of weeks and used up vital reserves, easing Brusilov's mission. 
However, exhaustion, losses, and overextension, as well as German assistance doomed the Brusilov Offensive despite it's extraordinary opening acts. 
Romania picked a truly horrible time to join the Entente powers, and invaded Hungary with a sense of foolish optimism. A German led Central Powers counteroffensive all but wiped them out in a single blow. 
Meanwhile, in Africa, von Vorbeck continued to school the Allies. 
1917 saw the near exhaustion of everyone involved. After the disastrous Nivelle Offensive, the French Army went on strike, and the British were forced into an offensive in Flanders to keep the pressure on the Germans, resulting in the slaughter of Passchendaele. 
The Russian Army, thoroughly depressed and worn out following their near triumph with Brusilov, collapsed under unrelenting German pressure. By years end, Russia was in the grip of the revolutionaries which had plagued Europe since the 18th century, and was effectively out of the war. 
With troops freed from fighting the Russians,  leaving secondary formations to create an independent Ukraine under the German controlled Rada, and to snatch up as much Russian territory as possible as Russia devolved into a blood soaked Civil War, the Germans released troops to Italy to practice a new tactical doctrine. The resulting offensive smashed the Italians, who never fully recovered and the French and British were forced to shore up the Italians while the Germans built up for the final showdown in the West with Russian Front Divisions. 
Von Vorbeck continued to run circles around everyone in Africa. 
1918 saw the Germans throw a last chance offensive in the West to knock out either the British or French before the mass of the newly entered American Army could tip the numerical scales past the point of no return. Initially the German offensives were crushing, and ruptured the entire front, threatening to split the British and French, strike to the Channel ports, and seize Paris. 
But such was not to be. 
The Allies recovered, and with massive American reinforcements, began to strike back, forever after putting the Germans onto the defensive. For the rest of the war the Allies hammered, relentlessly, the Germans all along the Western Front, overall under supreme French command. And even if the American efforts were clunky and absorbed horrific casualties out of ignorance and military unpreparedness, their sheer weight of numbers overwhelmed the Germans. (The Yanks were in the main theater of war, full time, for not quite four and a half months, and suffered over 100,000 killed in action in that time). 
The Ottomans collapsed under British-Indian pressure in Mesopotamia and Palestine-Syria as well as Arab warbands gallivanting around and destroying things in their rear areas and generally making a nuisance of themselves. With the Greeks joining in, the Allies, finally broke down the Bulgarians in the Salonika Front and the Serbs retook their conquered kingdom. Russia descended into the nightmare of their Civil War. 
The Austro-Hungarian Empire died in northern Italy along the Piave River, and Germany collapsed as well, suing for peace in early November. 
Von Vorbeck, never truly beaten, decided to surrender as well. 
Keegan does point out that the conflict didn't really end in 1918. There was the horrific Russian Civil War, itself as bloody on it's own as the entirety of the historically agreed upon First World War.  There was revolutionary violence from Finland all the way down to Hungary and into Germany. All of it crushed by nationalist or monarchist forces, at least until 1945 when the Red Army by fiat asserted the issue. The Greeks made a play at Aegean and Ionian empire, only to be defeated in 1922 by the Turks not far from Ankara. 
And the Poles secured, briefly, their independence in 1920 by thrashing the Soviets who sought to export revolution to central Europe.
And Keegan does a very good job of showcasing, throughout the book, how the Second World War, was merely the continuation of the First. 
And if his narrative leaves out some of the details I just outlined, it is still a very useful book. I see it as an excellent primer on the war, though I wouldn't recommend it to someone who already has a bit of knowledge on the war.

First book I read on WWI. I enjoy history, but found it hard to follow. After a while, I wasn't sure who was with the French, the Russians, Germans. A little too bogged down on the details, not enough big picture stuff. But I did learn a little.

A great introduction for anyone looking to study the First World War. Its fairly brief, but its very clear and easy to understand while also remaining interesting.

A very good one volume history of the Great War by the late military historian Sir John Keegan. Highly recommended for anyone wishing to learn in this 100th anniversary of the beginning of the Great War how it came about, the senselessness and horror of millions of lives thrown away by military leaders not comprehending what they were facing, the fact that empires were destroyed unleashing the endless wars of nationality in the 20th century, that England and France didn't win the war, but instead survived it, and finally that World War II was basically the resumption of the Great War.

Well written and accessible (more so than Stevenson's Cataclysm that I read a couple of months ago). Reading about WW1 is like watching a train wreck -- can't look away from tragic events that seemed quite avoidable.

More focused on battles than Stevenson, who focused more on big picture economic and social parts of the war. Keegan does a particular nice job in highlighting how killing technology had advanced into the industrial, modern age but communication technology had not. The lack of quick communication had big implications for diplomacy (or lack there of) at the start of the war, for naval battles, and for land battles where communications related to an attack could take hours to days to reach commanders and then get their response back to the forward units.

I'd highly recommend reading the two together with Keegan first and Stevenson second.

As I’ve often proclaimed my deep and abiding love of history, it is somewhat difficult for me to admit that my knowledge of the great upheaval of World War I is about the size of a teacup pig. Now, before I get any further into the terrors of trench warfare, machine guns, and unrestricted submarine warfare, let’s take a moment to reflect on teacup pigs: (soundtrack provided by the Beach Boys) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q2FUsP...

Back to the horrors of the Great War.

Any student of anything knows that you have to start with the basics. When learning about historical events, the fundamental building block is a “one volume history” by a “popular historian.” In other words, it’s a book that’s not too long, written by someone for whom language itself is not a second language.

For the purposes of World War I, my choice of John Keegan’s The First World War was a no-brainer. Keegan is a prolific and well respected author, highly-educated and learned yet fairly accessible. His take on World War I is moderately recent (published in 1998) and, at just over 400 pages, is relatively short, especially for such an expansive subject.

As might well be expected for a book titled The First World War, Keegan’s history spans from the 1914 assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand (the heir to the Hapsburg dynasty, not the Scottish post-punk revival band) to the Armistice of 1918.

Of course, with any one-volume history of a titanic event, there are bound to be tradeoffs. What to leave in, what to leave out. Where to go into detail, and where to skim. Because of the shortness of Keegan’s work, there are more tradeoffs here than most. Many aspects of the Great War are dealt with at the epidermal layer.

The most depth and insight comes right at the beginning, in Keegan’s retelling of how the war began. This also happens to be the best part of the book. Anyone with even a passing familiarity with World War I knows that its origins are as complicated as Inception and as mysterious as Justin Bieber’s fame.

In school, you probably learned – as I did – about the infamous “entangling alliances,” which constituted a half dozen or more treaties, each with a dead man’s switch that tripped. Following the Archduke’s assassination in Sarajevo, Bosnia, then an outpost of the Austria-Hungarian Empire. The A-H’s blamed Serbia, and threatened to attack; Russia threatened to join the war to help Serbia; Germany threatened to join the war to support A-H; France then threatened to join the war in support of Russia; and Germany decided to attack France, through Belgium, which brought Great Britain in on the fun.

If this all sounds desperately suicidal, well, it was (with good reason did JFK turn to Tuchman’s The Guns of August during the Cuban Missile Crisis). However, Keegan does a good explaining the logic – if that’s the right word – behind Europe’s decision to hand the 20th century to the United States (thanks, by the way, we sure enjoyed a good run; and best of luck to China).

In Keegan’s telling, the magic word is “mobilization.” Back in the good old days (of monarchies and mustard gas), it took armies a great deal of time to gather, equip, and set out for war. The speed of this mobilization was determined, mainly, by railroad timetables: how many carloads of men, equipment, and so forth, could be moved in an hour, a day, a week. The French even had an algorithm for how much territory they’d lose during each day of delay in mobilization. (And this is why we should not trust math).

The net of interlocking and opposed understandings and mutual assistance treaties…is commonly held to have been the mechanism which brought the “Allies”…into conflict in 1914 with the “Central Powers”…Legalistically that cannot be denied. It was no treaty, however, that caused Austria to go running to Berlin for guidance and support in the aftermath of the Sarajevo assassination – no treaty in any case applied – but anticipation of the military consequences that might ensue should she act alone…[I]t was the calculation of a presumed military response, of how it was guessed one military precaution would follow from another, that drove Austria to seek comfort in the Triple Alliance from the outset, not the triple Alliance that set military events in train.

The most important “military precaution” was the German’s so-called Schlieffen Plan. It was predicated on the German belief that they could not hope to fight and win a war against both France and Russia at the same time. Thus, at the outset of any war, the Germans planned a lightning strike into France, hoping to topple her within 40 days or so, and then turn their attention to the East. In order for this plan to work, and to avoid France’s string of frontier forts, the German Army would have to cross through neutral Belgium.

The Schlieffen Plan very nearly worked; however, it was stopped short of its goal following the horrendously complicated (and violent) battle of the Marne. By the time Keegan gets finished telling the woeful story of the Marne, and the battles of the Frontier that preceded it, he is tapped out on battlefield detail. From this point on, his telling becomes more cursory, and The First World War begins to feel like more of a survey. As Keegan starts to skip from event to event, the acute judgments and thought-out analyses of the first few chapters lessen.

World War I is as complex on its battlefields as it is in its politics. The masses of men and horses involved really boggle the mind. It’s like the Pelennor Fields in Return of the Kings, except the scale is even bigger and Legolas is covered in lice and choking on chlorine gas. The movement of troops on this scale are exceedingly difficult to follow. When Keegan starts to name the army groups – Army X, Corps IXV, etc. – the page starts to look like the copyright to a movie. And when he starts to explain where those various armies are going, it turns out they’re going to places you haven’t heard of, and which might not exist anymore.

The problem, I think, is that at certain parts of his book (the Marne especially), Keegan couldn’t decide whether to go all-in on his descriptions, or whether to keep it simple. The result is a cursory description of the order of battle, without any context whatsoever. Too often, the words on the page had no real meaning. For instance, at one point, Keegan writes:

Army IX, consisting of Corps VI and Corps III, made up of Divisions XI, XV, and XVX, marched twenty kilometers toward the village of Ferret Tongue, crossed the Smelly Frenchman Creek, and launched an attack en echelon against the IVth Corps of the German Army, located in the province of Waffle (somewhere in present-day Belgium).

Okay, I made that all up. The point remains, however.

And there needs to be maps! Many maps. There should be a law about this. In books about World War I, there should almost be maps everywhere. Here, there are 17 maps, ranging from relatively helpful (a conceptualization of the Schlieffen Plan) to absolutely needless (a map of the battle of Jutland, which shows the North Sea and has an X where the battle of Jutland took place). This isn’t nearly enough to help me figure anything out. Besides, the maps were apparently made in color, and then put into black & white. Have fun figuring out which shade of black represents the British Expeditionary Force!

Throughout the book, I felt like Keegan was losing steam, or maybe I was losing interest. Certain theaters of the war, especially the battles in Africa, are relayed so half-heartedly, that I wondered why they were included at all. The great climax of the war – the last German offensive and the entry of America – becomes an anticlimax in Keegan’s hands. Despite offhandedly mentioning the tipping power of America’s entry onto the Allies’ side, the contribution of the Yanks is given extremely short shrift.

My main problem with The First World War is in its textual presentation. Despite being a short book, it felt like a long read. This is due to Keegan’s style, which can best be described as dense (also, thorny, or tangled). His sentences are often long, studded with commas, set off with dashes, and packed with so much information that the sentence’s point is lost. To wit:

The French could not delay German reinforcements more than four weeks – the Schlieffen Plan, to the details of which Austria was not privy, reckoned six weeks – so that it was perfectly safe, as well as essential, for Austria to attack Russia in Poland; and, even if Austria found itself committed to a Serbian war, it would not be let down by Germany; as to Serbia, the problem “will solve itself for Austria as a matter of course.”

Diagram that!

Too often, a Keegan sentence would fail the Twice-Over Rule. This rule, which I just made up, states that if I have to read a sentence twice-over too often, I will soon start skimming the pages. If, after skimming for some time, I realize I can’t recall anything that happened in the last twenty pages, I will throw the book out the window and play video games. Keegan also has the annoying habit of proving how smart he is. We get it, John! You know about every battle that was ever fought. You don’t need to compare everything in World War I to Agincourt, Waterloo, or Antietam.

Another thing I disliked about The First World War was its lack of intimacy. World War I gave us some of the most beautiful and personal accounts of any war in history, yet Keegan is apparently unmoved. There is a disheartening paucity of grunt-level recollections, which might have added some life to the narrative. Instead, for the most part, we are left with Keegan’s dry, stuffy, Oxbridge-ian sentences.

This remove, I posit, is intentional on Keegan’s part. I don’t know anything about the guy, aside from his Wikipedia page, but his writing reeks of the aristocracy. Throughout these pages, he takes little to no time to develop any characters or to connect various names to anything resembling a human person. What little time he does spend, though, is in the company of the generals, the “great men,” such as French, and Joffre, and Haig.

There is even a section – proportionately long, too – in which Keegan vigorously defends these men. He takes umbrage at the brilliant German tactician Max Hoffman’s conception of the British army as “lions led by donkeys.” Not true, Keegan insists. And in support of this argument, he lists the difficulties inherent in command, and makes increasingly facile and strident comparisons to the Napoleonic Wars and the American Civil War.

Not only does Keegan’s argument miss the point – of human suffering beyond imagination – but it’s wrong. His own book proves this point. Time and again, generals on all sides – but especially Haig at the Somme – failed to achieve breakthroughs because of a lack of preparation, foresight, and nimbleness. Moreover, Keegan’s heroes – Haig and Joffre – are pretty awful men, or at least unfeeling. Joffre never let the war disturb his sleep or cause him to miss a meal. And Haig made petulant diary entries in which he blamed his men for not trying hard enough. This doesn’t exactly make them the second comings of the Duke of Wellington. Certainly, all these generals did the best they could; just as certain, they aren’t worth Keegan tearing the elbow patches off his tweed jacket in a full-throated defense.

Now, I’m just grumbling. I’m apt to do that, sometimes, when a book annoys me. And truly, this book annoyed me; however, it also proved to be an astute primer on one of history’s bloodiest fulcrums. Whatever else you can say about him, John Keegan is a brand you can (mostly) trust. If you’ve got to start somewhere, it might as well be here.

I think Keegan was a hawk who was never able to step back and see the true insanity of war. This book is 427 pages of just that -- insanity. 40 million dead, 21 million wounded -- and without WWI, there couldn't have been a WWII -- where 40-50 million died. For me, Kaiser Wilhelm emerges as the true villain of the 20th century...Hitler and his cronies were were but by-products of Germany's humiliation and sense of loss. I did a lot of skimming, for I wasn't interested in the strategic battle details. The writing itself is impressive and often elegant.

I hate reading about WW1. Keegan actually makes it interesting. This book is good for those that want a broad overview. You can actually understand much of the points he's trying to make. Not nearly as dry as the other two books I read on the topic.

-May Ling

Ii love history and I'm a bit obsessed with WW I since we just passed the 100th anniversary of the armistice. The first chapter was good but after that he lost me. Heavy heavy on military actions that I frankly found hard to follow. I felt I needed to have a map by me so I could follow what he was writing.

A great, very well written and researched book that gives you a clear and concise overview of world war 1. My u derstanding of the war was hugely enriched by this book.