The Guns of August, Chapters 1 – 9

History and cake

Author: Barbara Tuchman

Category: I’ve wanted to read this book since 12th grade

My thoughts: Dear reader, I’ve decided to write about this book in stages. The Guns of August is a project, a monumental thing. So I’m going to divide and conquer (since I’m reading about war strategies of various countries, I couldn’t resist a battle metaphor). Interesting side note: the events in this book happened almost 100 years ago this month.

The Guns of August opens with the funeral of Britain's King Edward VII, which occurred in 1910. This marked the end of an era (pardon the cliché). In a few years after the funeral, Edward’s nephew Kaiser Wilhelm of Germany would no longer be monarch, for starters. Other monarchies (like the ones in Austria-Hungary and Russia) would vanish as well. After the war, the map of Europe was recreated, and empires began to crumble.

The first few chapters are about the war plans of the countries involved (Great Britain, France, Russia, and Germany), and their alliances. I remember, in high school history class, learning that entangling alliances were one of the causes of World War I. At the time, I thought that it was as if the countries of Europe were mean girls, and if one is mad at another, all her friends are mad at that country, too (I was in high school, and surrounded by mean girls). Keeping track of those alliances is a bit tricky. The French couldn’t stand Germany because of the 1870 war that Germany won. Russia and France were in an alliance that stated one would protect the other in the event of a German attack. England was willing to help out France, and to protect Belgian neutrality in the event of a German invasion. This led to a tense environment that was akin to a balloon continuing to swell and swell until it finally pops. That “pop” is the murder of Archduke Ferdinand (of Austria-Hungary) by a Serbian nationalist.

When the Archduke is killed, Russia agrees to protect Serbia if Germany aids Austria. Because of all those alliances and understandings (and because Germany did, in fact, violate Belgian neutrality), France and England become involved. And this, dear reader, is how a war becomes a world war.

The first few chapters also introduce some of the main players: the Kaiser, Chief of the German General Staff Helmuth von Moltke, Czar Nicholas of Russia (whose physical resemblance to his cousin King George V of England is FREAKY; they look like twins), and Sir Edward Grey, Britain’s Foreign Secretary, who famously said of the eve of England’s declaration of war on Germany, “The lamps are going out all over Europe. We shall not see them lit again in our time.” Also, Winston Churchill is also present, as he was First Lord of Admiralty for Britain at the time. No doubt he learned a thing or two for when he had to lead his country through war less than thirty years later. And despite all the plans and war strategies, no country thought the war would last for very long. European wars in the decades before World War I had been relatively short. Britain’s Lord Kitchener was the only one who foresaw a long war.

One interesting thing is that Barbara Tuchman wrote The Guns of August right in the middle of the Cold War. So we, as modern readers, know more than she does in regards to how this story plays out. When she was writing this (in 1962), Germany was still divided and the Soviet Union still existed. As a child of the ‘90s, I remember hearing about the fall of the Berlin Wall, the reunification of Germany, the breakup of the Soviet Union, and the drama and chaos in the Balkans. From the year of Edward VII’s funeral, until seeing images of people taking pickaxes to the Berlin Wall and hearing unfamiliar names like “Bosnia” on the news at the end of the 20th century, so much changed in European and world history. The Guns of August documents the slide into world war that caused these decades of change. That makes this book monumental.

Great passage: Although the defects of the Russian Army were notorious, although the Russian winter, not the Russian army, had turned Napoleon back from Moscow, although it had been defeated on its own soil by the French and British in the Crimea, although the Turks in 1877 had outfought it at the siege of Plevna and only succumbed later to overwhelming numbers, although the Japanese had outfought it in Manchuria, a myth of its invincibility prevailed.

P.S. As seen from the above passage, Barbara Tuchman could really construct a sentence!

P.P.S. Did you know, dear reader, that during World War I the British monarchy changed its name from the Germanic House of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha to the (very British) House of Windsor? Here in America, sauerkraut was renamed “liberty cabbage.” Luckily, only the first name change stuck around (because…liberty cabbage? Really?)