BOOK: Gordon Martel, "The Month that Changed the World"

Gordon Martel: The Month that Changed the World: July 1914 and WW1. Oxford University Press, 2017 (first ed. 2014). 9780199665396. xxv + 484 pp.

How could I resist another book about the July Crisis, the flurry of diplomatic activity between the assassination of Franz Ferdinand and the outbreak of WW1 about a month later? I have read several such books already — Fromkin's Europe's Last Summer, McMeekin's July 1914: Countdown to War, Clark's Slepwalkers (shame on me, I was too lazy to write blog posts about the last two of these) — but this one, by Gordon Martel, is probably the best one yet.

What sets this book apart from the others I've read is that it very deliberately refrains from looking for any deeper explanations for the war. It starts with a provocative epigraph: “After the historian has ascertained the facts, there is no further process of inquiring into their causes. When he knows what happened, he already knows why it happened. — R. G. Collingwood, The Idea of History.” I could practically see the author making a troll face when picking that quote :)

Like many such books, it starts with a bit of background, through it doesn't go into this as broadly and as far back as e.g. Sleepwalkers does. One notable thing about this introductory chapter is its focus on the idea that Europe had been at peace for a long time by then and that nobody saw much of a reason why this should change. There were no obvious reasons for Great Powers to go to war against one another and war was increasingly seen as an obsolete thing that was only happening in the colonies or in peripheral, backwards regions such as the Balkans (pp. 2–5). (As I vaguely remember it, many other books present the situation as much more tense, as if everyone was holding their breath waiting for a war to break out. Fromkin says (p. 39) that Europe was “in a mood [. . .] to smash things”.)

There is a chapter about the assassination of Franz Ferdinand, which goes into a reasonable but not excessive amount of detail. There is a bit more about the background of the various conspirators involved in the assassination (pp. 50–64) than I remember from some of the other books about this. One detail that was new to me from this chapter was how poor the security had been during Franz Ferdinand's visit — Martel contrasts it with the much tighter security during the visit of Emperor Franz Josef a few years earlier (p. 72). In other words, you can't help feeling that the assassination, and hence the outbreak of the WW1, the millions of casualties, etc., could have been prevented just with some additional security measures that should have been routine in such cases anyway — wow!

The book then goes into a fairly detailed week-by-week treatment of the developing crisis over the next three weeks, but its main focus, and what the author reserves the term ‘July Crisis’ for, is the one-week period between the Austrian ultimatum to Serbia and the Austrian declaration of war on Serbia. In this period each day gets a separate chapter to itself. There were many interesting details here that I hadn't heard of before or at least hadn't been really aware of them. I used to think of the war as being more or less the fault of Germany, though after reading Sleepwalkers I thought that some of the blame might also go to Russia for its mobilizing while pretending that it wasn't really doing so. But now after this book I couldn't help feeling that there is plenty of blame to go around for nearly everyone involved.

I was impressed by the extent of the concessions that the Serbs were prepared to make in response to the Austrian ultimatum (pp. 206–7, 304), and depressed by how relentlessly stubborn the Austrians were in their wish to go to war against Serbia (pp. 249, 305). The Serbian reply was seen by nearly everyone else as an excellent basis to solve the crisis peacefully with a bit more negotiation (pp. 243–5, 265, 271). Edward Grey, the British foreign minister, was proposing that a conference of ambassadors (British, German, French, Italian) should mediate between Austria and Russia (the latter being the chief protector of Serbia in this crisis); pp. 180, 195, 346. Others proposed direct discussions between Austria and Russia (pp. 223–4, 269). But the Austrians wanted to go to war against Serbia, they were convinced that their prestige and their status as a Great Power requires it, and the ultimatum had really been just an excuse and nothing more. I was in principle aware of this before, but it comes across more clearly in the more detailed exposition in this book.

I also couldn't help being annoyed by the British for not announcing clearly and early that they would stand by France and Russia. Perhaps if they had done so, Germany would have backed down, then Austria might have backed down and the war would not have happened at all. But sadly, Grey stubbornly refused to make any sort of commitments (and admittedly, most of the British cabinet, as well as the public, was strongly against any such involvement up until the German invason of Belgium; pp. 251, 280, 290, 367, 376–8, 384–8). On August 2: “No one was certain what the British would do. Especially not the British.” (P. 374.) :))

An interesting detail that I wasn't previously aware of concerns the involvement of Italy. Their alliance with Germany and Austria was defensive, so I thought that this was by itself enough of a reason for them not to enter the war. But in this book it turns out there was another issue: their alliance included the concept of ‘compensation’, in the sense that if one of Austria and Italy expanded its territory in southeastern Europe, the other one must get some territory as well, as a sort of compensation, to keep the balance of power between them I suppose. During the July crisis, Germany was constantly urging the Austrians to sort out the matter of compensation with Italy and thereby ensure that Italy would stand by them. Ideally Austria would have offered some of its own predominantly-Italian territories, which had been coveted for some time by Italian irredentists; or at least some bits of territory in the Balkans. But the Austrians pretty much offered nothing, and as a result Italy stayed neutral (pp. 185–6, 231–5, 276, 289, 339, 342).

But the overall impression of the way the crisis is presented in this book is one of chaos and madness. (“By evening [of July 30] there was confusion everywhere”, p. 328.) This is no doubt in large part because the author deliberately keeps the narrative at a fairly low level: the story proceeds chronologically, day by day, almost hour by hour, and the story is basically one long procession of meetings and telegrams being sent back and forth, often at the most unholy late-night hours. (“By Sunday [August 2] morning everyone involved in the crisis was utterly exhausted”, p. 374.) I didn't even try to keep all the details in my head as the story is too complex for that and the cast of characters too numerous. But these events probably felt just as confusing and chaotic to the participants themselves, and the good thing about the way this book presents the story is that it gives you an idea of what it must have felt like to them.

Perhaps my favourite part of the book is the concluding chapter, “Making Sense of the Madness”. First it tells the history of the history of the July Crisis, so to speak — i.e. how the crisis was seen by historians and politicians over the rest of the 20th century. Already during the war, the various countries involved published (more or less biased) selections of diplomatic correspondence in an attempt to justify their involvement in the war and blame their enemies for causing it (p. 402). The question of war guilt also attracted a great deal of interest just after the war; the Versailles Treaty famously included an article that blamed the war on Germany. More and more diplomatic papers were published by various governments in an effort to facilitate the study of the origins of the war (pp. 408–10).

By the 1930s, as most of the politicians directly involved in the outbreak of WW1 were dead or retired, the question of the origins of war became more of a topic for historians than politicians, and it began to be studied by a new generation of slightly less biased historians such as Sidney B. Fay and Bernadotte Schmitt (pp. 412–3). Accordingly attention focused away from the July Crisis and more towards various deeper causes of the war: nationalism, imperialism, capitalism, etc. (Martel makes an interesting argument that this had an unfortunate side effect in the 1930s: as people widely accepted the idea that the war had such deeper causes, this meant that they couldn't blame it primarily on Germany; but this, since the Versailles treaty was premised on the idea that Germany was guilty for the war, made it hard for them to object when Hitler started dismantling the treaty after he came to power. “When Hitler came to power and began his campaign to tear up the treaty of Versailles, there was no one left to speak up for it.” P. 415. See also pp. 421–2.)

Since then, countless books have been written about the origins of the WW1, and you can't help feeling that Martel is a bit jaded about the whole thing: you can pick one or more (or all) of the Great Powers (and/or your favourite -ism) and you can surely find, in the inexhaustible mass of diplomatic documents and other sources from the July crisis, something to blame the war on them in particular. I guess this is why his book very deliberately refuses to blame anyone (and indeed when I got to this point in the book I couldn't help admitting that it had never really pushed me into assigning blame to anyone in particular — any ideas about blame that I had had while reading it had come from my biases and my interpretations of the story as described in the book).

Considering that so many different ideas have been put forth as to the deeper causes of the war or which Great Power(s) should be blamed for it, you can hardly blame the author for not wanting to commit himself to any of these theories (or putting forth yet another one of his own). This is why he focuses on the July Crisis itself, and argues that ultimately the war was triggered by the decisions made by those specific people in those specific days, mostly that fateful week at the end of July 1914. “War was not inevitable. It was the choices that men made during those fateful days that plunged the world into a war. They did not walk in their sleep.” (I guess this must be a jab at Clark's Sleepwalkers? :]) “They knew what they were doing. They were not stupid. They were not ignorant. The choices they made were rational, carefully calculated, premised on the assumptions an attitudes, ideas and experience that they had accumulated over the years. Real people, actual flesh-and-blood human beings, were responsible for the tragedy of 1914 — not unseen, barely understood forces beyond their control.” (Pp. 420–1.) “Blind ‘historical forces’ did not devise ultimatums or mobilize millions: men of flesh and blood did.” (P. 425.)

Another epic sentence from p. 422: “Men do learn from their mistakes: they learn how to make new ones.” :)) The author demonstrates how some of the lessons learned from the outbreak of the WW1 led to new problems in the years leading up to the WW2 (pp. 422–3, 430).

What to say at the end? I really liked this book. Some of the middle parts while the crisis is in progress can be a bit dry at times, but the concluding chapter more than makes up for it. This book gave me a fresh perspective on the July Crisis and the outbreak of the war.