The Guns of August

May 1910, London. King Edward VII dies, and his funeral brings together, in a single ceremony, nearly all the royalty of Europe: nine kings on horseback behind the coffin, among them Kaiser Wilhelm II, the late king's nephew. Barbara Tuchman opens the book with this scene because it sums up a world that didn't yet know its days were numbered, a Europe of royal cousins and a feeling that a major war between European powers was a thing of the past.

It's almost a screenwriter's trick: setting that procession full of certainties against the chaos that would come just four years later. Think of a family wedding, everyone in suits, smiling for the photo, with no idea that before long half of them will have a bitter fight and never speak properly again. This contrast between the pomp of 1910 and the destruction of 1914 prepares the reader for how far the fall would be behind the elegant ceremony, with old tensions of rivalry and colonies that no crown could solve alone.

The Europe of 1914 was split into two big blocs of mutual commitment: on one side Germany and Austria-Hungary, on the other France, Russia, and Great Britain. It was like a group of friends who promise, half joking, to fight together if any one of them is disrespected at a party, except that here the promise involved entire armies, with no one agreeing on what to do if the fight got out of hand right from the start.

Add to that decades of arms racing and of general staffs planning, year after year, how each army would move on the first day of a future war, with train schedules calculated almost to the minute. The problem is that once the first country began to mobilize, stopping halfway became nearly impossible: it was a domino effect set up years earlier, just waiting for someone to touch the first piece.

Germany's perennial fear was fighting France in the west and Russia in the east at the same time. The solution cooked up by the general staff, named after the general who designed it, was to knock out France quickly, in about six weeks, with a wide sweep of troops through Belgium to encircle Paris, and only then turn the army against Russia, which would take longer to mobilize because of its huge territory and slower railroads.

It was a plan drawn up in the smallest detail, almost a timetable calculated to the minute, with no real margin for the unexpected. Helmuth von Moltke, chief of the German general staff in 1914, inherited the original design and tinkered with it, weakening precisely the right wing that was supposed to make the biggest encirclement, a change that would weigh heavily in the following weeks. Carrying out the plan also required moving troops through Belgium, a neutral country, a calculated risk that helped bring Great Britain into the war within the first few days.