be imagined that strategic history occurs randomly, ever vulnerable to course redirection
by surprises, great and small. The past acts as an enabler for the particular future that did
happen, not as a slave-master. Also, while one should be impressed by the potential of
contingency and non-linearity, one should be similarly impressed by the argument that
great strategic events are apt to have great enabling causes, or predispositions to unfold.
There is some merit in the Marxist cliché ‘It is no accident...’There are deep and
compelling political and strategic reasons why the subject of this chapter and the next is
‘World War I’ and not ‘the Third Balkan War’. Similarly, as later chapters argue, although
World War II and then the Cold War were not strictly inevitable – very little is literally
inevitable – there were powerful reasons why those mighty conflicts were probable.
A contested history
Historian Niall Ferguson asserts that World War I ‘was nothing less than the greatest
error of modern history’ (Ferguson, 199 8 : 462; emphasis in original). Obviously, that
proved to be the case for the defeated Central Powers, while one might claim that even
the nominal victors would have been better served by the avoidance of war in 1914.
However, the error thesis is profoundly arguable, with its implications of incompetent
statecraft in several capitals. In 1914, indeed throughout the war, leaders made mistakes,
as they always do, but as a general rule the policy-makers knew what they were doing,
they understood the certain or highly probable consequences of their decisions, and they
had strong and pressing reasons for the courses of action they took. This is not to deny
the fact that policy-makers did not comprehend as well as they needed to the military
instrument that they were using (Clausewitz, 1976: 607– 8 ). But the generals themselves
were scarcely more expert on the subject of modern warfare until the war was well
advanced. Efforts to understand and explain World War I politically, strategically and
militarily are bedevilled by a number of potent myths. It is necessary to expose the most
misleading of these before proceeding to present the war as accurately as the evidence
permits.
Whereas one can describe views of 1914–1 8 as ‘a contested history’, no such
description can be applied to 1939–45. This is not to ignore the ongoing historians’
debate about the origins of the war: for example, was 1939–45 strictly ‘Hitler’s war’
(Martel, 19 8 6; Boyce and Maiolo, 2003)? World War I holds a unique place in modern
strategic historiography. It is the most misunderstood conflict of modern times. Why
this should be so is a fascinating topic for enquiry, much of which needs to be undertaken
by cultural and social historians, rather than by those who approach the black episode
strategically. Nevertheless, today it is not particularly difficult to attain a grasp on the
causes, course and consequences of the Great War in which considerable confidence can
be held. New scholarship over the past twenty-five years has revealed more about the
ways in which the war was waged than most of the studies conducted during the previous
sixty. It is said that often it is more difficult to expel a false idea than it is to introduce a
new, more correct one. Few adherents to the traditional, near-universally negative view
of the performance of the major human players in the war can be persuaded that they
subscribe to a legend. They resist the notion that they do not have a defensible view of
the strategic history of the most important event of the twentieth century. So powerful
are the negative myths that the analysis in this chapter and the next can make no progress
World War I: controversies 77