In The Pity of War, Niall Ferguson makes a simple and provocative argument: that the human atrocity known as the Great War was entirely Englands fault. (source: Nielsen Book Data) Publisher's summary
For anyone wanting to understand why wars are fought, why men are willing to fight them, and why the world is as it is today, there is no sharper nor more stimulating guide than Niall Fergusons The Pity of War. Ferguson vividly brings back to life this terrifying period, not through dry citation of chronological chapter and verse but through a series of brilliant chapters focusing on key ways in which we now view the First World War. And yet, as Ferguson writes, while the war itself was a disastrous folly, the great majority of men who fought it did so with enthusiasm. More British soldiers were killed in the first day of the Battle of the Somme than Americans in the Vietnam War indeed, the total British fatalities in that single battlesome 420,000exceeds the entire American fatalities for both World Wars.
That the war was wicked, horrific, inhuman, is memorialized in part by the poetry of men like Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon, but also by cold statistics. The war was not inevitable, Ferguson argues, but rather the result of the mistaken decisions of individuals who would later claim to have been in the grip of huge impersonal forces. Britain, according to Ferguson, entered into war based on nave assumptions of German aimsand Englands entry into the war transformed a Continental conflict into a world war, which they then badly mishandled, necessitating American involvement. The Pity of War makes one very simple and provocative argument: that the human atrocity known as the First World War was entirely Englands fault, that Englands entry into the war was based on a miscalculated and nave exaggeration of German aims, and that Englands entry into the war transformed a continental conflict into a World War that they then badly handled, necessitating American involvement. An explosive and argumentative new book that rewrites our most basic assumptions about the causes and consequences of the First World War. 'Maximum slaughter at minimum expense': war financeĪ landmark work of history. Economic capability: the advantage squandered Last days of mankind: 28 June - 4 August 1914 Empires, ententes and Edwardian appeasement Bibliography Includes bibliographical references (p.
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