How Wars Begin by A. J. P. Taylor

Author:A. J. P. Taylor [Taylor, A. J. P.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Endeavour Media
Published: 2019-03-27T23:00:00+00:00

4 – THE FIRST WORLD WAR

The Great War, the first world war as it was later called, broke out at the beginning of August 1914 and it followed on a month of intense activity.

Indeed the month of July 1914 has probably been more studied than any other month in history. Thousands of documents have been published - British documents, French documents, German documents, Russian documents, Italian documents. Only the Serbs have not revealed their documents although they are said to be in print. Hundreds of historians have laboured, one book after another has been written.

During the war of course each side blamed the other. The Germans said it was caused by entente aggression planned by Russia or France. The allies said that it was caused by German aggression and the Treaty of Versailles repeated this statement.

Gradually, as historians worked, these sharp interpretations were rejected and there grew up something like a general agreement. There were still qualifications that one power had made more mistakes or was more at fault than the other but broadly by the time the second world war came along, historians were agreed that there had been no deliberate plan for war on the part of any power and that there had been a series of mishaps and mistakes and misunderstandings. As Lloyd George said 'We all muddled into war.'

Just when historians thought 'Well that is one subject I can talk on for ever and never have to add anything new' there came along a German historian Fritz Fischer from Hamburg, who studied first of all the German war aims actually during the war. They were as you can imagine to hold on to all the territory that they had conquered and get more if they could. Then Fischer turned back to the period before the war and identified these aims as having already been formulated, perhaps not in the highest places but in very influential circles where the talk was of the conquests to be made. Other historians joined him, some of them arguing that the Russian army was outstripping the German and that the German generals had agreed that in 1914 was the last chance when they could fight a favourable war.

In recent years the younger generation of German historians has come more and more to the belief that the Imperial German government was actually a driving force for war and that the war which broke out in August 1914 far from being a war of accident was a war of design: a war, as one of them said, long prepared for.

The Imperial government, it was alleged, was anxious for war in order to prevent the victory of social democracy and the transformation of Germany into a democratic country. It was fought not only in the interests of the imperial authorities, the officers and the army, but of the German landed class. The historians who say this are not Marxists, they are historians from Western Germany.

In fact the Marxists in Eastern Germany are very jealous that they did not hit on this.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.