A World Undone: The Story of the Great War, 1914 to 1918 [Paperback]

The first chapter of the book "A World Undone: The Story of the Great War, 1914 to 1918" by G.J. Meyer begins with a detailed narrative of that fateful date in Sarejevo when an Austrian archduke and his wife are gunned down by a nineteen year-old Serbian nationalist. I was alarmed when I realized that this entire chapter was strikingly identical to the first chapter of Edmond Taylor's "The Fall of the Dynasties, 1905-1922", which is one of my favorite but an oft-overlooked work of the time period. Thus, I was not surprised when I turned to Meyer's bibliography and found Taylor's work cited as a source for this chapter. At that point, I was fearful that "A World Undone" was going to be nothing more than a pitiful mashing of previous historical works relating to the time period (similar to Joseph Persico's "Eleventh Hour, Eleventh Day, Eleventh Month.")

Despite the frequency of texts throughout Meyer's book with stark similarity to existing literature, "A World Undone" does have several redeeming qualities. The author does provide some analyses that deviate from the status quo, such as depicting Moltke the younger as the executor of an impossibly doomed Schleiffen Plan rather than the meddler who transformed an intrinsic path towards victory into defeat. Meyer also balances the traditional views of the Great War with contemporary accounts that have emerged in the last decade, such as his acknowledgement of the Entente's self-delusion that Germany's casualties were substantially greater than their own, when in fact the opposite was true (as cited by John Mosier's "The Myth of the Great War").

In spite of the original analyses and acceptance of theses from contemporary historians, no quality of Meyer's book distinguishes it more than the fact that it is an overview of the entire Great War written not as a study but as a story. The Great War already has some great studies of the war, such as works by A.J.P. Taylor or a recent one by John Keegan, but Meyer manages to retell the events of the Great War as they occurred without completely seperating them from the happenings occuring on other fronts or other theaters at the time. Studies of the Great War may note that the Battle of the Somme began and ended while the latter half of the Battle of Verdun was raging, but such works usually discuss them individually and thus extract them from other occurances at the time period. In Meyer's account, however, it is much easier for the reader to perceive that the fighting in the Somme, at Verdun, or in Galicia occurred simultaneously in 1916 rather than individually.

For novices on the subject of the Great War, Meyer's "Background" sections to subjects relating to the Great War add a significant amount of depth to the conflict. However, I was disappointed that "A World Undone" gave little more than a passing mention to battles beyond Europe or the Middle East, such as ignoring the successful resistance of Lettow-Vorbeck's askari soldiers in German East Africa beyond the armistice. Indeed, the ommission or bare-mention of the fighting in Africa, Asia, and on the seas beyond Europe may cause those new to the subject to wonder if the Great War was indeed a "world war" or nothing more than a massive European calamity.

Furthermore, I found past classical works relating to the war (e.g. Tuchman's "The Guns Of August", Hornes' "The Price of Glory", Taylor's "The Fall of the Dynasties"--all cited by Meyer) to be generally more eloquently written (but often less broad in scope), while the analyses provided by AJP Taylor and John Keegan in their respective works to be more thorough.

Although "A World Undone" is not the definitive work of the war that has produced some our best nonfiction and fiction literature, it should by no means be ignored by students of that conflict.

G. W. Meyer takes on an enormous task in this book. He tries to tell not just what happened leading up to and through WWI, but the important historical background to give the events context. He pairs a Background chapter with what we can call each 'Events' chapter. This is an extremely creative way to write about what is already a huge tableau. It provides the unfamiliar reader some context, but is inevitably frustrating to those who have gone deeper. By the structure of the work, Meyer has taken on the task, for example, of summarizing the over 1000 year history of the Hapsburg Empire in ten or fifteen pages. So, over-generalizations and the occasional plain error creep in. For an example, at one point Meyer states that Russia had never been made to compromise with other European states--apparently glossing over their defeats by Napoleon and the entire Crimean War. These grate on the reader who has read more on each of these Background chapters.

That being said, in a book for a general audience for whom this is perhaps their first introduction to European history of the period, this is an enormous achievement. Meyer takes a lens from far above what is happening, attempting to show the over-arching reasons why certain things happened. He is more likely to discuss the idea of Ludendorff creating a flexible defense, rather than having troops in a rigid and fixed front line, than he is to talk about what happened at a certain hill or dale. You get the overview--why were the Germans almost successful in 1918 after years of stalemate--rather than they took this town or this fort. When a city is mentioned, he tells you why this place was important. For example, Amiens is where most of the French Railways came together and had the town been lost, France would not have been able to move troops and might have needed an armistice.

The book reads easily and crisply. Meyer never loses sight of the enormous human cost of each campaign, and often puts this in a modern context--Losses for both sides in Passchendale were 3 times or 6 times (the detail escapes me at this moment) what the U.S. lost in the entire Vietnam War. He provides interesting and useful character sketches of the major players, each of whom has of course spawned multiple full length biographies.

If you've done no reading on this subject, this book is highly recommended. I passed it on to my wife who is explicitly NOT interested in history, thinking that this way of telling the story of the cosmic changes wrought by this period might actually grab her.

For those who want to go deeper, certainly Barbara Tuchman's 'Guns of August' is a masterpiece. John Keegan's 'The First World War' is excellent on the military side. For those who are interested in how and why the apparently mighty Austro-Hungarian Empire collapsed, Frederic Morton has two wonderful books, 'A Nervous Splendor' covering the late 1800's, and 'Thunder at Twilight' covering that Empire in 1913-14.

World War I was the death knell of one kind of civilization and the launching of several competing models of other ways to organize a national community. It deserves study, and this work is an excellent start.

Meyer's work is a good, eminently readable account of the Great War that is a relatively quick read. It avoids getting bogged down in the minutiae of military maneuvers. Unlike Barbara Tuchman's works, he focuses on a limited number of characters. You won't be searching Wikipedia for arcane names every-other-page.

Otherwise, Meyer's work doesn't offer much new to students of WWI. The villains are oft recognized from their appearances in previous accounts of the Great War. The Kaiser, Czar Nicholas II, Haig, Ludendorff, and Joffre make their obligatory appearances as either incompetents, or in the case of Ludendorff, a military genius but political failure. To Meyer, many of these personalities were well meaning, but overwhelmed by events and the enormity of modern warfare.

Where Meyer varies from common themes is seeming to place much of the blame for the immediate start of the war on the Austrians Conrad and Berchtold. Conrad broods for an opportunity to attack Serbia without appreciating enough the Russian threat. Berchtold supports Conrad for selfish, political reasons.

Meyer also apparently feels that peace "feelers" in the later years of the war were sincere and might have saved Germany from a Versailles style capitulation if Ludendorff hadn't so stubbornly clung to his no compromise position vis-a-vis Belgium and parts of occupied France.

For readers new to WWI, Meyer's work offers a well organized overview of events with logical explanations. "A World Undone" makes the complex history of 1914-1918 approachable.

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