Book Review: The Lost History of 1914

Jack Beatty has taken a hard look at the "inevitability" of World War One, and deftly refuted the argument. The core of his book is the first six chapters, each looking at one of the major combatant countries and how close each came to NOT entering onto military action in Europe in 1914 (or 1917). The six are Germany, Russia, England, United States, Austria-Hungary, and France.  

The most interesting arguments are those on England, the US, and France. As any serious scholar of England knows, until the very last days of July 1914, it looked far more likely that the British Expeditionary Force would go to Ireland, as civil war broke out between Protestants and Catholics over Home Rule, than to France in the wake of Germany's attack through Belgium. 

If not for a nationalist editor publishing scandalous but true accounts of the skirt-chasing Minister of Finance, Joseph Callaux, Mme Callaux would have no cause to shoot and kill the newspaperman - derailing her husband's otherwise easy electoral victory and appointment as Prime Minister. With the renowned Jean Jaures as his foreign minister, and Callaux's track record of successfully mollifying German demands, it is unlikely that war on the western front would have broken out.

The most fascinating chapter is on the US, as Beatty underscores the anti-imperialist stance of President Wilson, and his break with the Taft policy of supporting Mexico's dictator, the favorite of Wall Street. Beatty shows how Wilson's motives in landing troops in Veracruz, Mexico in April 1914 was to support the rebels, by blocking arm shipments to the president of Mexico - but the fact of American troops on Mexican soil was portrayed as renewed imperialism. Provoked by Villa's 1916 raid on Columbus, NM, Wilson sent General Pershing on a wild-goose chase after the rebel formerly supported by Wilson. The renewed presence of American troops on Mexican soil prompted closer ties between Mexico and Imperial Germany, culminating in the disastrous Zimmermann telegram of 1917, promising Texas, New Mexico and Arizona to be restored to Mexico. Beatty argues that the telegram was even more decisive than the resumption of unrestricted submarine warfare against American merchant ships in generating a fever for war in the heartland.

There is much more in Beatty's book; I have not even touched on the last four chapters, covering the last months of 1914, as the spade replaces the machine gun as the key instrument of war.  Beatty's book is well-written, and well worth the time and attention of anyone interested in how the war could have been avoided.