After ancient, I wanted to read about something more modern and dramatic. This way, the book The First World War by the British military historian John Keegan ended up in my hands.

This volume was first published in 1999 and is renowned for being a detailed and well-researched work that could fit into a relatively small number of pages.

I genuinely enjoyed the style of the book: it’s coherent and distinct. Events aren’t only described – the author also sees the general strategy of military campaigns and explains the repercussions of definite military clashes or political decisions.

But the biggest shock for me was the numbers: Keegan meticulously reports the numerals of killed, wounded, and missing after each notable battle, sometimes broken down by day. For instance, in the Battle of the Somme, the Germans lost 600,000 soldiers killed and wounded, while the Allies' losses and casualties also exceeded 600,000 – almost 195,000 for the French and nearly 420,000 for the British. On the first day of the attack, of the 100,000 Englishmen who took part in it, 20,000 did not return, and 40,000 were wounded. It was only after reading the Keegan’s detailed explanations of the fighting methods that I truly grasped why it happened and the enormity of the death toll.

n  Rarely do thoughtful nonfiction books evoke such strong emotions, but this book succeeded.n

The turning point of the twentieth century that no one wanted. A monstrous war machine destroyed millions of lives and shattered the legacy of the nineteenth century. We now live in a world of Nazism, totalitarianism and total war. John Keegan tells the story of how this came about.

The story of the meat grinder comes down to two factors: resources and the hands of the butcher. Are those hands so important when there are no knives or power to run a meat grinder? World War I proved that they were not. Its history is replete with talented commanders and brilliant breakthroughs, but the depletion of resources has always put an end to the successes of generals. Whether it was the Brusilov breakthrough or Ludendorff's operations, the end is always the same: mountains of corpses and no hope.

The main strategic mistake of the war is usually called Moltke's decision to transfer two corps to the western front. This was the end of the Schlieffen plan and the beginning of a war of attrition, in which Germany simply had no chance. But in World War II, Hitler managed to implement this plan, and where did Hitler end up afterwards? Of course, strategic talent continued to play a major role, but the condition for victory henceforth was railway capacity, demography and industry.

No matter how they tried to overcome the positional stalemate: they adjusted the interaction of infantry and artillery, and endlessly transferred barrage fire here and there, and drove reserves, and trained storm troopers in infiltration tactics, and put in motion gases, and concentrated an insane amount of artillery for a firewall. All to no avail. The mountains of corpses on the attacking and defending sides were roughly equal, and there was no strategic change.

War took the form of a meat grinder, and generals took the form of butchers. They couldn't stop putting meat through the churn, because victory is simply a process of mass murder in which the enemy's population runs out faster than yours. And Germany had run out of it. To be fair, some of the generals could not accept their new role. Field Marshal French, for example, stayed in hospitals, spending time with maimed soldiers. The era of jolly heroic campaigns had faded into oblivion. At some point, the soldiers began to realise their meat value and refused to go on the attack. French soldiers' strikes after Verdun, the decline and disintegration of the Russian army after the great retreat from Galicia, the demoralisation of the Germans after the failure of the spring offensive, and as a crown - a series of revolutions in Russia and Germany. It turned out that demography can be not only physically destroyed, but also psychologically. However, the history of World War II no longer sins of such cowardice. Keegan pays special attention to analysing the psychological state of soldiers at crucial moments - after all, he is a specialist in the psychology of war!

For all the book's merits, however, damn it, Keegan piled on the cringe with the Australian corps. The lines about the fearlessness of a British army unfamiliar with defeat deserve a special mention. I mean, that's just ridiculous. I am amazed to the core by historians who are unable to separate their background and their sympathies from their subject matter. There is a palpable imbalance in the book when describing events on the western and eastern fronts. The events in the east were dynamic, important and quite complex, and a little more time could have been devoted to analysing them. Instead, Keegan enthusiastically recounts the adventures of the Australian Corps, the New Zealand Volunteers and the fearlessness of the Canadians.

I guess I've jumped straight to the sensibility of a middle-aged father of three because I'm compelled to read nothing but war histories now. I've been browsing the shelves of Oxfam looking for a good account of the Somme.

This is by all accounts a good single volume introduction to The Great War, if only because it gives you just enough context to seek out deeper information on the many aspects of the conflict it glosses over.

It is, however, unforgivably hokey at times. This is a book which ends with the following: 'That is the ultimate mystery of the First World War. If we could understand its loves, as well as its hates, we would be nearer understanding the mystery of human life'. The weird bursts of sentimentality really stick out like an unexploded shell, when most of the rest of the book is a solemn accounting of the movements of army battalions.

I really like Keegan but not this one. Crammed with too much detail, including seemingly every movement by every unit that fought, down to the company, but very short on insight or analysis. The politics of the war are only dealt with perfunctorily and only a few of the military leaders are described with any detail. Even then, it's only generals and field marshals; common soldiers only rate a brief mention here and there. Annoyingly, the maps don't link with the text-rivers and villages and surface features described aren't displayed at all, making most of them pretty useless. What analysis exists is mostly a critique of other historians' analyses. All in all, the war is just too big a subject to cover in one relatively short volume.

A perfect single volume overview of the conflict called The Great War. Its quality and substance is pretty much guaranteed by the fact that it was written by John Keegan, in my opinion one of the greatest historians of our days.
Limited to about 400 pages, this book can impossibly provide in depth information about all the details of this great conflict. The author therefore provides the 'broad picture' overview of the events and from military perspective, stays in his narrative consistently on strategic and operational level. Make no mistake, this book is a primer and those looking for detailed descriptions of Somme offensive, dogfights over Arras or battle of Jutland will have to look elsewhere.
At the same time, it is great testimony to Keegan's literary talent that this book, despite being a 'generic' one volume overview, he not only manages to provide a balanced factual account of events at all principal fronts, but also manages to give the human aspect of this conflict the due it deserves.Snippets with personal recollections of the horrors of the conflict serve as a constant reminder to the reader of the real cost hiding behind the mind-numbing tale of grand military offensives and political decisions.
Overall, this is a superb book for those wishing to gain better understanding of First World War. It will also serve well as a starting point in more detailed study of that conflict. It provides balanced historical analysis and it is a joy to read. One can't wish for more in a book of this type.

"Men whom the trenches cast into intimacy entered into bonds of mutual dependency and sacrifice of self stronger than any of the friendships made in peace and better times. That is the ultimate mystery of the First World War. If we could understand its loves, as well as its hates, we would be nearer understanding the mystery of human life."

It's very rare for me to give a book this comprehensive a middling review, but I seriously thought the book could have been better. From one of the better historians of our age, this wasn't his best effort. Part of it of course is the subject matter, which makes for dreary literature no matter how hard you try. But, an author like Barbara Tuchman brought life to the beginning of the war and the battle of the Marne, so I was shocked Keegan did not do the same.

His best chapters are the first ones, in which he follows the outbreak blow-by-blow. It makes for good reading and differs a little from Tuchman's account. I especially liked Keegan's perspective that while alliance receive the blame for starting the war, preemptive mobilization created the domino effect. That idea certainly meshes well with the prevalence of military plans present in the days prior to 1914, and created a different thought as to what actually "started" the war.

On those plans, Keegan did a great job exposing the initial flaws in the Schlieffen Plan (came down to manpower) which I had not heard before. The rest of his analysis on the buildup to the war is filled with interesting tidbits, but he focuses on the war being unnecessary.

At about this point, the book decreases in value. His discussion of the Marne, particularly, is especially lackluster. In other battle descriptions, Keegan takes the survey approach, rarely providing grisly details that make life in the trenches feel real. At points, I wondered when the battle had happened. This was a common problem throughout the book...while informative, it provided very little characterization of either the generals or any soldiers.

On that note, Keegan is outrageously pro-British. He passes over Sir John French's whiny dog routine in 1914 with scarcely a strong word, despite French almost blowing the Marne. Prior to Operation Michael in 1918, Keegan claims the British had gone undefeated on the Western front up to that point. This statement despite incalculable losses at the Somme, Arras, Loos, and Mons. The British rarely achieved any of their objectives in the war, with only Cambrai serving as a British triumph.

Keegan does, however, make an excellent point about the war. He believes the conditions were such that the indiscriminate slaughter was unavoidable. Once trenches began, says Keegan, the resulting offensives "over the top" suffered from the technological hindrances keeping them for communicating with command. There are numerous examples of offensives that initially worked and then stopped because orders were orders and no back-line commander knew that more territory could be seized. The lack of wireless radio is something not rarely discussed in the conventional histories, but Keegan accurately points out how the lack of wireless communication often doomed offensives to failure.

Lastly, the ending of this book was severely anti-climatic. Rather than focus on events in Germany leading up to the 1918 armistice, Keegan spends more time discussing the Bolsheviks in Russia. That works with his contention that WWI created totalitarianism, but the war's end just happens out of thin air. I was disappointed there wasn't more from him on the ending.

Some random things I enjoyed learning:

- the Czar was supportive of Serbia in the beginning which convinced the Serbs to reject A-H peace terms.

- The Austrians did very little in this war. For a once great empire, their conduct during WWI is not very flattering, with the exception of the victory at Limanowa

- Keegan's treatment of Gallipoli is fairly good and his comments about the faulty plan being exacerbated through bad terrain intelligence added a lot to my understanding of the battle

- Not much to say on the Americans, they are rarely mentioned in the book

Overall, a reference book, but not one I would recommend as either a "must-read" or exciting treatment of the war.

Great book, a wonderful one-volume account of the first world war. After reading "The Guns of August," I needed to read about the rest of the war. Keegan combines depth of knowledge with a facility in writing that keeps the story zipping along. He explains how WWI went from a war of movement to trench warfare on the Western front, and the why the trenches proved to be so very static (if one side attacks and leaves behind their supply lines, etc, they become weaker and more vulnerable, while the side attacked, falling back on prepared positions, gains in strength. You can go on like this for years -- and they did). He is also good at providing compelling anecdotes, such as one about the entry of America in 1917. At one spot on the Western front, the British troops were falling back before the Germans and advised the Americans to retreat. "Retreat?" the Marine commander said. "We just got here." The Marines stayed and won the battle.

The First World War produced carnage of such scope and magnitude that it remains difficult to contemplate. As an American who has lived most of a 62-year life in the zone of Eastern states between Pennsylvania and North Carolina, I'm used to reading about Civil War battles -- 23,000 casualties at Antietam, 51,000 at Gettysburg. But with World War I, I find myself reading about battles that inflicted 300,000 casualties, or 500,000, and resulted in nothing more than a slight change in the battle lines.

In The First World War, John Keegan does a superb job of capturing the complexity and the tragedy of the 1914-18 war that decimated a generation of young Britons and Frenchmen and Germans. Among Keegan's conclusions: World War I effectively killed the Enlightenment in Europe -- blighting the continent's optimism and its faith in liberal democracy, establishing ideal conditions for the totalitarian dictatorships that would start World War II. Indeed, Keegan holds that "The Second World War, when it came in 1939, was unquestionably the outcome of the First, and in large measure its continuation" (p. 9). A war that killed 40 million people and did nothing more than to lay the groundwork for a new and more terrible war twenty years later -- it is a grim thing to contemplate. So is the idea that there may have been, in effect, just one World War, with a twenty-year "halftime."

Some of the things that Keegan reveals about World War I may surprise you. He acknowledges the aerial excellence of Manfred von Richthofen, the "Red Baron" whose eighty combat victories make him "the highest ranking pilot ace in any of the war's air forces"; but then reminds the reader that "Air operations were...marginal to the issue of defeat or victory even in 1918" (p. 406). And the program of unrestricted submarine warfare carried out by the dreaded German U-boats belied a stubborn reality: "The geography of the German-speaking lands, however configured into states, denies the Germans maritime power" (p. 265).

Amid the vastness of the larger picture, Keegan makes sure to provide the telling details that bring the war to life. I was struck by Keegan's account of the disastrous Russian defeat at Tannenberg -- a German "encirclement" victory in which the Russians lost 50,000 killed and wounded, plus 92,000 taken prisoner. The defeated Russian commander Samsonov "repeatedly expressed despair: 'The Emperor trusted me. How can I face him again?' Finding a means to be alone for a few minutes, he shot himself" (p. 150).

Australian and New Zealand readers will find particularly compelling Keegan's account of the campaign and battle of Gallipoli. As Keegan makes clear, British commanding general Sir Ian Hamilton's plan for success on that sandy Turkish peninsula "could not work, nor could any other have done with the size of the force made available to him" (p. 241). Yet the ANZAC troops immortalized themselves by the depth of their sacrifice against impossible odds, and to this day the ANZACs' "grandchildren and great-grandchildren often bring [their] medals back with them to Gallipoli on...pilgrimage, as if to reconsecrate the symbols of the ANZAC spirit, a metaphor for that of the nation itself, on sacred soil" (p. 249).

Fans of Ernest Hemingway will be reminded of A Farewell to Arms when they read about the battle of Caporetto -- a disaster for Allied Italy, in response to which, during the long and agonizing Italian retreat, the Italian commander Cadorna "did his best to increase the number [of dead] by a ruthless and characteristic...execution of stragglers", a brutal episode of "judicial savagery [that] could not halt the rout nor did it save [Cadorna's] neck" (p. 349).

And because I had the good fortune to watch the United States Marine Corps' Silent Drill Platoon perform at Belleau Wood, the site where the Marines saved Paris from capture during the last major German offensive of the war, I was particularly moved by Keegan's recounting of Belleau Wood. The Germans' "Big Bertha," a gun with a 75-mile range, was in position to fire upon Paris; and as Keegan tells it, "At an early stage of the battle in their sector it was suggested to a Marine officer by French troops retreating through their positions that he and his men should retreat also. 'Retreat?' answered Captain Lloyd Williams, in words which were to enter the mythology of the Corps, 'Hell, we just got here'" (p. 407).

These were the stories that stood out for me; perhaps other stories will stand out for you. Keegan writes well and makes the war understandable, and he consistently remembers the importance of emphasizing the human dimension of war. With helpful photographs and maps, this is truly a magisterial history of World War I.

A thorough, readable and well-researched history of the First World War. Keegan fully captures the sweep of this conflict, covering all the important topics in enough detail. His coverage of the July Crisis is good, though he admits that it’s basically just a summary of previous works on that particular subject. He thoroughly covers all of the theaters of the war in a smooth chronological fashion. Keegan’s analysis of military strategy and tactics is great, and he tells it all in a manner that anybody can understand. He shows how the advent of new technology affected the way the war was fought, and how it transformed the conflict into a murderous stalemate.He describes how commanders were unable to adapt tactics to the new technology that existed. He does not, however, describe the development of this technology in much detail. Unlike other histories, Keegan also devotes a good amount of space to the more obscure “side-show” theaters like Africa, Asia, the Caucasus, and the 1918 North Russia intervention.

Keegan’s treatment of the the various commanders, notably Douglas Haig, is mostly favorable. In their own time, all of the Allied generals were seen as great men, but following the war, which exposed the horrors of modern warfare to the world, they were widely seen as foolish, uncaring, and unfeeling to the miseries endured by the common soldier. Since enlisted men tended to dominate the new literature of war memoirs, novels, and poetry, this image has become a lasting one. The generals’ upper-class background, impassive photographic expressions, and habit of living in relatively luxurious conditions as their own men lived in ones much worse make the generals unsympathetic to modern readers familiar with the horrors of modern war. But as Keegan points out, these things can be misleading, since many of the war’s generals often exposed themselves to the same dangers, communications in those days were less than ideal, and the distance of headquarters was necessary due to the vast expanse of the fronts.

Keegan shows how Europe’s statesmen viewed the continent as a giant chessboard, but were flummoxed when they found themselves locked in a most ungentlemanly modern war without precedent and without any rules. Keegan does cover the naval war, but not in enough detail to satisfy this particular reader. Still, he does mostly cover all the important and relevant parts of this story. Keegan reveals how Germany lost the war despite the superior quality of its commanders. One disappointment was Keegan’s coverage of the end of the war, another the insufficient quantity of maps (which are next to useless anyway). The final, decisive campaigns and even the armistice and the Treaty of Versailles are given disappointingly short shrift; they come off as afterthoughts.

Still, a clear, vivid, and well-written history of the war. Keegan easily describes the experiences of the politicians, generals, and soldiers, how the war began, the war’s course, and its end and legacy.

This was a decent volume of the first world war. Really difficult to put everything that occurred in one volume but I believe John Keegan did a good job. The main causes and battles were put into the book. Along with some detail regarding the most important battles including naval and middle eastern conflicts. I personally enjoyed GJ Meyers A World Undone more but both were well put together.

Pretty good one valume of the first world war but beware:
1. He refers to many towns and areas in Europe that do not appear on the maps he put int he book. So, I would say he should have used more maps and put some relevant towns on them.
2. He had some pretty weird sentence structure with verbs comeing at the end of certain sentences. Maybe becasue he is British it just did not flow well to me, and seemed to bog down because of that. I swear, there were some sentences that totally would have sounded perfect if Yoda had read them.
3. Do not try to get any sense of what the US did in WWI from this book. They truly are merely a foot note in the book.