OPINION:
AUGUST 1914: FRANCE, THE GREAT WAR, AND A MONTH THAT CHANGED THE WORLD FOREVER
By Bruno Cabanes
Translated by Stephanie O’Hara
Yale University Press, $27.50, 230 pages
More than half a century ago, American historian Barbara Tuchman wrote “The Guns of August,” which won her kudos from President Kennedy on. Such micro history was less common in those days, although there is no arguing with the pivotal nature of that eponymous month, which although less than a decade and a half into the 20th century, spawned the multitudinous horrors which made that epoch one of the bloodiest ever.
French historian Bruno Cabanes, who is professor of Modern Military history at Ohio State University, has taken a very different approach to his predecessor in his compact but distinctly unsuperficial study of the month which saw the outbreak of World War I. Where Mrs. Tuchman began her book with a colorful account of Britain’s King Edward VII’s funeral in 1910, with a host of royal heads of state connected by family and political alliances but soon to be at loggerheads, and goes on to a dense discussion of strategy and its consequences, Mr. Cabanes takes a very different approach:
“The decisive month of August has often been studied from the viewpoint of diplomats and general staffs but rarely from the perspective of a country and its inhabitants in the grip of war … Through largely neglected sources such as eyewitness accounts police notes, personal correspondence, and diaries, I seek to bring back to life the passions, hopes, and illusions that historians often forget: the pain of separation and the anguish of what is to come; the fear of the enemy within; the threat of invasion.”
Yes, of course we hear from generals and statesmen and learn about strategic plans, but more often we hear about individuals being wrenched from their homes, being bored in barracks before being hurled precipitately into the terrifying maelstrom of battle, of those left behind to worry. And this is a historian with an eye for detail, from the terrible mutilations of bodies wrought by the instruments of modern warfare to the lack of proper funerals and closure for their loved ones.
Not that Mr. Cabranes neglects the larger picture. He can cite disastrous statistics with devastating effect: “Never in France’s military history had so many men been killed in so short a time — twenty-seven thousand French soldiers on August 22 alone and forty thousand overall from August 20 to the 23rd.”
But he never loses sight that these many thousands were living, breathing human beings and we feel their fear, their shock at how terribly things were not going according to plan. Not to forget the civilians displaced from their homes, subjected to hardship and actual atrocities, not some figment of propagandistic imagination:
“The American novelist Edith Wharton did humanitarian work with refugees in the north of France. In a letter to one of her friends in the United States, she wrote: ’The “atrocities” one hears of ARE TRUE. I know of many, alas, too well authenticated.’”
Reading this book, you smell the destruction and fear, feel the pain and shock, experience the disillusion felt by so many. For the overconfidence and hubris of those who enacted what they believed was a foolproof plan is nothing less than astounding. They really thought the war would be over in a few weeks. Would that they had been right. But it’s not just in hindsight that their delusion and arrogance stands out.
Apart from its intrinsic virtues, this book provides a refreshing counterpoint to the fashionable nostrums and jargon which have made so much contemporary French historiography all too often unreadable. So I would urge readers put off by the fact that it is translated from the French not to avoid it for fear of being bogged down in tedium, as my first instinct was to do, having been burned so many times. It’s not only that it is ably translated into readable English prose, but the quality of Mr. Cabanes’ writing and ability to cut to the heart of the matter shine through. I hope that it does not seem too chauvinistic — and what a pleasure to use in its original real sense that adjective which has been hijacked by feminists — on my part to think that living and teaching in the United States for 10 years (he taught at Yale before coming to Ohio State) has influenced his style and approach to good effect.
When Mr. Cabanes writes at the beginning of his wrenching story that “In short, this book is an intimate history of the end of a world,” he is not exaggerating. And, although he concentrates on those few seminal weeks at the outset of the conflict, he concludes with a wrenching account of the terrible four years plus that were a direct result of the mistakes and failures of August, 1914, demonstrably “A Month That Changed the World Forever.”
• Martin Rubin is a writer and critic in Pasadena, Calif.
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