THE GREAT WAR: Ten Contested Questions. ABC Books. $27.99.
Reviewer: ROBERT WILLSON
The centenary of the so-called "Great War" has stimulated a flood of books and television programmes examining every facet of that terrible conflict. This new book is not a potted history of the war but rather a discussion of some of the issues about which we still argue. Did Germany engineer the war to build an empire? Were those who refused to support the war really traitors? Was the war partly caused by religious issues?
Haig Park in the Canberra suburb of Turner commemorates the British Field Marshall, Douglas Haig, who was one of the generals directing the allied war effort. In the 1920s, when the park was named after him, he was seen as a hero, but a century on he is reviled as a "donkey" who threw away the lives of so many British and Empire soldiers in battles like the Somme. Recently there have been demands to rename the park.
Ten Contested Questions began as an ABC Radio National broadcast, hosted by Geraldine Doogue, who writes a most perceptive foreword to the published transcript of the programme. Among the impressive list of military historians who have contributed to it are Joan Beaumont, Hugh Strachan, Jay Winter and Peter Stanley.
One of the great values of this book is that it summarises the many recent books that cover different aspects of the conflict, its causes and its consequences for the 20th century. Most of us will never read these books but here we have a pithy summary of what historians are saying about issues we still argue over, such as how big a part the US and Russia played in Germany's defeat. And why British "war poets" dominate battle literature.
In chapter seven the reader is invited to look at the war from the view of the losers: Germany, Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman empire.
A key factor driving Germany into the war was its geographical location. The fear of encirclement was the dominant paradigm of German diplomats and military planners before the war. Another fascinating issue is the extent to which Germany is now observing the centenary of the Great War.
On the headstone of a soldier from Sydney, William Rae, who died in 1918, his parents inscribed the words: "Another life lost, hearts broken, for what." This excellent book probes that conundrum even if it does not answer it.
*Robert Willson is a Canberra reviewer.
