World War One: The Crisis in European History--The Role of the Military Historian

Author(s): Michael Howard

Source: The Journal of Military History, Vol. 57, No. 5, Special Issue: Proceedings of the
Symposium on "The History of War as Part of General History" at the Institute for
Advanced Studies, Princeton, New Jersey (Oct., 1993), pp. 127-138
Published by: Society for Military History
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World War One:

The Crisis in European History
The Role of the Military Historian

Michael Howard

ILITARYhistory-by which I mean the history of armed forces

and their operations of war-can no more be separated from
general history than can the activity of war itself from the societies that
engage in it. But the association can be of varying degrees of intimacy.
At one extreme are the societies of classical antiquity which were so
constantly engaged in war that their "general history"was all effectively
militaryhistory. At the other are those periods when the armed forces of
a state and their campaigns have seemed sufficiently remote from the
concerns of society as a whole for their activities to form the object of a
discrete and specialized study.
Such was the case in eighteenth-century Europe, the age par excellence of "LimitedWar,"when the antimilitaristicmind-set of the Enlightenment was formed in France, Britain, and the United States among a
class of philosophes who saw war as the redundant activity of an
obsolescent feudal ruling class. Events in Europe between 1789 and
1815 forced some readjustment in such views by continental thinkers,
but even the Napoleonic warshad been very largelyfoughtby gorgeously
M

uniformed specialists, often in regions remote from the main centers of

population-certainly
remote from Britain and the United States.
For Victorian England military affairs were literally peripheral. Wars
were fought by small professional forces a long way from home.
Military history, however popular, was not a matter that attracted the
attention of serious scholars. The army itself was a marginal element in
society and its activities a matter of only intermittent interest. The navy
was even more peripheral, but although no one underrated its imporThe .ournal of Military History SPECIAL ISSUIE57 (Octoher 1993): 127-38

? Societv for Militarv Ilistorv

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MICHAELHOWARD

tance, it had to await the era of Alfred Thayer Mahan for any serious
study of its activities.
On the Continent, events took a somewhat different course. There
the Napoleonic Wars had been formative and central, and their historians,
whether Frenchmen like Adolphe Thiers or Germans such as Heinrich
von Treitschke, had naturally to give military history pride of place. But
by the end of the century, even in Germany, academic scholars were
happy to leave the study of military affairs to the specialists of the
General Staff whose interest in it was primarily didactic; and if, like
Hans Delbriick, they were rash enough to trespass on that private
territory, they received very rough treatment indeed.'
The First World War changed all that. Clausewitz had seen in the
Revolutionary Wars of his era the first appearance of "Absolute War,"
and for someone brought up amid the assumptions of the eighteenth
century it was a reasonable judgement to make. But if "Absolute War"
meant the mobilization of all national resources in a fight to destruction,
the difference between the wars of the revolution and the "Limited
Wars" of the immediate past was minimal. The states of Europe-even
Napoleonic France-simply did not have the capacity to mobilize their
resources for a "total" conflict, and vast areas of the continent must
have remained unaffected by the Napoleonic campaigns.
"Absolute War"became possible only when, as happened in nineteenthcentury Europe, the state acquired the bureaucratic structure, the
transportation networks, and the communication systems that gave it
the capacity to mobilize its manpower and industrial potential for
military purposes, together with the ability, through taxation and loans,
to finance a prolonged struggle. It was then that war became absolute,
or "total," in an unprecedented sense. Then also the military and their
activities ceased to enjoy the kind of autonomy that had given the
concept of "military history" its peculiar legitimacy. Once war was
conducted by governments rather than by generals and fought by-and
against-entire peoples rather than by professional armies, the boundary
between "military" and "general" history became very difficult to trace.
The one merged almost imperceptibly into the other.
It is indeed almost absurd to categorize the conflict of 1914-18 as if
it were just another war between European states and their auxiliaries
on the model of those of Louis XIV or Napoleon or Bismarck; a simple
clash of the Great Powers to settle the balance between them. Both at
the time and since, "The Great War" was widely seen as a cataclysm
resulting from the interplay of forces almost beyond human control; a
"World Crisis" (the term used by Winston Churchill as the title for his
1. Arden Bucholz, Hans Delbruck and the German Military Establishment
(Iowa City, 1989).
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own history of the war, of which the first volume appeared in 1923)2
that transformed European society and shattered its states system,
destroying four great empires and provoking revolutionary upheavals
whose effects are still working themselves out. It was this sense of the
almost cosmic dimension of the conflict that led to such widespread
dissatisfaction with the simplistic "war-guilt" explanations and accusations that were current after the war; a dissatisfaction that was not
created, however much it may have been exploited, by German historical
revisionism, and has not been entirely laid to rest by the controversy
over the work of Fritz Fischer.3 Few historians today are content to seek
the causes of the war in the diplomatic archives, or even in the military
plans of the Great Powers. Many, if not indeed most, now interpret it as
social and cultural-affecting
the
part of a general crisis-economic,
whole of European society at the turn of the century.

The search for the causes of the war will no doubt continue at
various levels of explanation for as long as historians write. But it is
doubtful whether the question would be so hotly debated if the war had
not had such far-reaching social, economic, and political consequences;
if it had been fought in a different manner, with a different outcome; if
it had ended before the exhaustion of the participants and the entry of
the United States. And for an explanation of why the war took the
course that it did, why it lasted for so long, and why no decision was
reached on the battlefield, we have to consult the military historians.
Although a vast amount of military history has been written about
the First World War, I do not know of any single satisfactory operational
account of it. (I do not, incidentally, know of a single satisfactory
general account of the war itself, but that is more understandable.) The
reason is clear; it is extraordinarily difficult to treat the military aspects
of this war in the discrete fashion that traditional military historians
prefer and their readers expect. Individual campaigns or battles can be
insulated and described: the Battles of the Marne and of Verdun, of
Tannenberg and of Caporetto, the Dardanelles and the Palestine campaigns, provide examples. But it is difficult to do this unless we take
them out of a highly complex context, without which they have in
themselves very little significance. With the possible exception of the
Battle of the Marne (which was not a true battle at all) these were all
episodes in the war, rather than decisive turning points such as Austerlitz,
Trafalgar, or Sedan.
2. Winston S. Churchill, The World Crisis (London, 1923).
3. Fritz Fischer, Germany's War Aims in World War I (New York, 1967).
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Military historians are most at home when dealing with strategies of

manoeuvre; the operations of armed forces involved in a series of
engagements leading up to decisive encounters. In this respect the
Second World War provides a far happier hunting ground for the
military historian than does the First. Although that war was (for the
Europeans at least) quite as "total" as the First World War-in some
respects considerably more-its course was determined by a series of
military operations directed according to rational strategic concepts;
operations each of which had a clearly defined outcome, with unambiguous winners and losers. The First World War was not like that, and
military historians can at least help to explain why it was not.

Few people doubted in 1914 that a long war would be shattering for
European society. The populations of Western Europe were believed by
their rulers to be highly volatile. Socialism was rife, labor strikes were
endemic, and for the past decade the Second International had been
mounting increasingly effective demonstrations against war. Even if the
people themselves initially supported a war, their capacity to endure
the prolonged disruption and hardship that war would bring in its wake
was a matter of widespread doubt. The former Chief of the German
General Staff, Graf Alfred von Schlieffen, expressed this in his famous
article of 1909 when he wrote that "a strategy of attrition is not feasible
when it requires the support of millions (of men) and milliards (of
marks)." 4 It was this prospect that made it so important to keep the war
short, and drove military leaders to adopt strategies that optimized
rapid operational success. The much-despised "Cult of the Offensive"
was less a question of irrational vitalism,5 as it has so often been
depicted, than of perceived operational necessity. Military commanders
mobilized the largest forces of which they were capable and directed
them so as to bring their adversaries to battle under the most favorable
possible circumstances in order to force a clear and victorious decision.
4. Reprinted from the Deutsche Revue of January 1909 in Graf Alfred von
Schlieffen, Gesammelte Schriften (Berlin, 1913), 1: 11-22.
5. The idea that "the cult of the offensive" was in itself irrational had been
examined and largely endorsed by Jack Snyder, The Ideology of the Offensive:
Military Decision Making and the Disasters of 1914 (Cornell, 1984). In fact
German offensives were uniformly successful throughout 1914 and 1915, and
continued to be so on the Eastern, Southeastern, and Southern fronts in 1916 and
1917. French, Russian, and Austrian failures were due less to mistaken concepts
than to sheer operational inefficiency. See Douglas Porch, The March to the
Marne: The French Army, 1870-1914 (Cambridge, 1981), and Norman Stone,
The Eastern Front, 1914-191 7 (London, 1975).
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They were of course working on the assumption that their adversaries
could be brought to battle, and that the battles would be at least as
decisive as in previous wars. As we know, the battles did not prove
decisive, when indeed they were fought at all; so by the end of 1914,
although European armies between them had already suffered nearly a
million casualties, the war remained un-won.
In 1915 the German High Command still saw no reason to despair
of the traditional strategy of manoeuvre bringing about a decision, even
if it took longer than expected. True, Erich von Falkenhayn, the Chief
of the German General Staff, denied to the commanders on the Eastern
Front, Ludendorff and von Hindenburg, the opportunity they demanded
of repeating the Schlieffen Plan against the Russians with another huge
battle of encirclement; but none the less their operations in 1915
rescued the Austrians, eliminated all Russian threat to German territory,
and drew the Western powers into a series of fruitless offensives in an
effort to relieve pressure on their allies. But another year went by
without a decision; Italy had entered the war against Germany, and the
Western allies were still undefeated. Britain had hardly begun to draw
on her huge resources and those made available to her by the United
States. Could a traditional strategy of manoeuvre now be as effective on
the Western Front as it had been in the East?
Von Falkenhayn thought not.6 He saw no reason why the Western
allies should not be able to repel a German attack on their heavily
fortified positions as effectively as the Germans had resisted their own
throughout the previous year. So he revived the concept of attrition,
the Ermattungsstrategie that von Schlieffen had dismissed as impossible.
German society had shown itself unexpectedly stalwart over the past
year under the strain of a prolonged war, but he believed the French to
be more vulnerable. The French army must be encouraged to bleed
itself to death by being compelled to recapture an objective that the
Germans had been able to seize at comparatively low cost. The objective
would be the fortress of Verdun, a name hallowed in the military history
of France. The low cost would be achieved by a massive use of heavy
artillery. The ultimate target was the will of the French people to
continue the war.
Von Falkenhayn's strategy did not work; not because it failed to inflict
nearly lethal damage upon the French army, which it did, but because
the Germans had as yet failed to develop an operational strategy that
enabled them to do this without suffering equal losses themselves. The
same difficulty was to confront the Western allies when they launched
their offensive on the Somme later in the summer of 1916. The British
6. Erich von Falkenhayn, General Headquarters and its Critical Decisions,
1914-1916 (London, 1921).
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Commander in Chief, Sir Douglas Haig, initially believed that this

attack might break the strategic deadlock and restore battlefield mobility,
but his subordinates were more skeptical; and even Haig soon accepted
that this was a battle of attrition fought to inflict losses on the enemy
rather than to gain ground; a battle to be prolonged until the late
autumn and renewed the following year.7
The main instrument for infliction of such losses, on the Somme as
at Verdun, was not so much manpower as artillery. This required the
mobilization not only of manpower but of industry, and the reordering
of all domestic priorities to produce guns and ammunition on the
enormous scale requisite for military needs. The British, once it became
evident at the end of 1914 that there was to be no rapid operational
decision in the field, had already begun such a reordering in 1915 with
the creation of a Ministry for Munitions under the dynamic leadership
of David Lloyd George-a reordering that in its turn transformed labor
relations and brought working-class leaders into full partnership in the
running of the war. The Germans followed suit the following year with
the Hindenburg Programme, when the scale of the Materielschlacht in
which they had involved themselves became clear. Thus by the end of
1916 the search for victory on the battlefield was resulting in nothing
less than the social and political transformation of the belligerent
societies.8 Not only the armies but the peoples of Europe were involved
in a total war; one whose strains did eventually precipitate the revolutions
so gloomily anticipated before 1914. Even the victors were to emerge
so badly traumatized that they were unable to assume the subsequent
burden of creating a more stable European, let alone World Order.

Counterfactual history is a more legitimate activity for military

historians than for most. It is their business to explain why commanders
took certain decisions and to trace their consequences. In evaluating
them, they have to assume that those commanders might have taken
other decisions, which would have had different consequences. It is thus
reasonable for them to ask what might have happened in the First World
War if the military leaders had taken different decisions; if their operational strategies had been more successful, and they had not found it
7. On this, see particularly Trevor Wilson and Robin Prior, Command on the
Western Front: The Military Career of Sir Henry Rawlinson, 1914-1918 (Oxford,
1992).
8. For the impact of military requirements on social change see, for Britain,
Trevor Wilson, The Myriad Faces of War: Britain and the Great War, 1914-1918
(Cambridge, 1986). For Germany, see G. D. Feldman, Army, Industry and Labor
in Germany, 1914-191 8 (Princeton, 1966).
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necessary to adopt a strategy of attrition. With greater military skill,
might the war have been fought and won without bringing about the
collapse of European society? Such certainly was the assumption of
postwar critics who accused the younger von Moltke of having "watered
down" the Schlieffen Plan; or of British "Easterners" like Winston
Churchill and David Lloyd George who argued that a reinforcement of
other theaters might have avoided the deadlock on the Western Front;
or of analysts like Liddell Hart who believed that deadlock could have
been broken by more skilful tactics.9 Behind such criticism lies the
assumption that alternative strategic decisions or superior operational
skills might have avoided deadlock, have brought about decision without
catastrophe, and so saved the old European order from revolution and
collapse. Upon such military assessments there thus hang immense
political consequences.
The most plausible of these hypotheses concerns the Schlieffen
Plan. Most historians today write on the assumption that the Schlieffen
Plan was foredoomed to failure, and that the offensive strategies of 1914
were in themselves irrational. Neither hypothesis is self-evident. We will
not enter here into the question, whether the plan would have been
more successful if Schlieffen's original instructions had been more
closely followed.10 Certainly even as modified in 1914 it was such a
grandiose and mechanistic affair that it demanded great good fortune
to succeed in its totality. But whatever variant of it was adopted, it called
for commanders whose nerve was stronger than that of their adversaries,
and who had the capacity to improvise when things started to go wrong,
as almost certainly they would-and as in fact they had in 1870. Given
such commanders, could German strategy not have been adjusted to
meet unexpected circumstances, as it had been in that earlier war, and
still achieved its goals, if by rather different means?
There was no lack of such enterprising officers in the higher ranks of
the German army. We may wonder what might have happened, for
example, if Ludendorff had been entrusted in September 1914 with the
kind of responsibilities on the Western Front that he was instead given
in the East. If the German armies had continued to advance, pushing
the French away from Paris and detaching the minimum force necessary
to contain the French Sixth Army and the B.E.F. on their right flank,
might they not still have presented their political masters with a decisive
operational victory that would have knocked France out of the war,
brought Russia to the peace table, left Britain isolated, and achieved the
mastery of Europe as decisively as did their successors twenty-five years
9. Churchill, World Crisis; David Lloyd George, War Memoirs (London, 1936);
B. H. Liddell Hart, History of the World War (London, 1934).
10. Gerhard Ritter, The Schlieffen Plan: Critique of a Myth (London, 1958).
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later? What if Joffre had been as neurotic as von Moltke, or von Moltke
as phlegmatic and adaptable as Joffre?
But this was probably the last chance for either side to achieve an
operational decision on so Napoleonic a scale. Although, as we have
seen, another year was to pass before the belligerents consciously
adopted attritional strategies, none of their operational options in 1915
held out comparable hope of such rapid and total success. Neither side
had yet developed the techniques that would make breakthrough possible
on the Western Front where alone decisive military success could bring
immediate political results; while the strategical alternatives offered by
Churchill and the "Easterners" in London-even a successful Dardanelles
campaign-merely
offered the option of an equally long war, if one
fought under marginally more favorable conditions for the Allies.
Military historians may reasonably suggest that Germany did stand
a good chance of achieving decisive victory in the field in 1914, and
that under more enterprising commanders she might well have done
so. But they are not in a position to answer the question, whether such a
victory would have brought about peace; above all, a peace that might
have preserved the old order in Europe. For that we have to turn to the
general historian, who has studied the nature of the belligerent societies
and the issues that appeared to be at stake.
The first point that such a historian is likely to make is that Germany
in 1914 was no longer controlled by a Bismarck concerned with fighting
a limited war and then reconstructing a viable balance of power. The
famous "September Programme" of 1914 indicates the peace terms
that the German ruling classes intended to impose on their defeated
adversaries.11 France would have been reduced to the status of Italy, if
not of Spain. The Habsburg Monarchy would have survived, but its
position in the Balkans would have been explicitly underwritten by
German economic and military power. Russia would have been enfeebled
by the loss of her western provinces. The Continent would, in fact, have
been subjected to a German hegemony almost as total as that of
Napoleon. Britain, had she continued to fight, would have done so
alone, and Germany could have renewed the naval race against her
under conditions of considerable advantage.
The British leadership in 1914 would thus have been even less likely
than were their successors in 1940 to accept any kind of compromise
peace: not that the German leadership of 1914 was likely to have
offered one. For a significant number of influential Germans, Britain
was the preferred adversary, and her humiliation the ultimate object of
the entire war. However complete the German victory by land, a
11. Fischer, Germany's War Aims; Hans W. Gatzke, Germany's Drive to the
West (Baltimore, 1950).
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prolonged Napoleonic conflict with Britain was still inevitable. So long
as the British could preserve their sea power, they could survive as they
had survived in the past and, they confidently believed, ultimately win
as they had won in the past.
To judge the prospects for such survival, we turn to the naval
historians. In 1914 the general expectation was that the issue at sea,
like that on land, would be settled by an immediate operational decision
brought about by a clash of battlefleets. When it was not, both sides
settled into a conflict of attrition at sea as they were soon to do on land;
but it was a conflict of a kind with which naval strategists were more
familiar than were military. The British had prepared for a strategy of
blockade, and felt comfortable with it. But they did not feel comfortable
for very long.12 Submarine warfare introduced a new operational
element with which they found themselves quite unable to cope.
After two years of successful submarine warfare, the German High
Command believed, at the end of 1916, that they had in their hands a
war-winning weapon, restraints on whose use were purely political.
Naval historians might be able to tell us what the prospects might have
been of submarine war successfully bringing Britain to terms if the
United States had not entered the conflict. But to explain why the
German government decided to risk American hostility at all, we have
to turn back to the political historian who will explain the domestic
situation in Germany in the autumn of 1916, and the part that this
played in the German government's decision to adopt unrestricted
submarine warfare and defy the United States.13 Certainly no purely
military specialist can explain the psychology of the people who, in full
awareness of the risks involved, took a decision that was in the long run
to prove so catastrophic.
But in any event by 1917 it was probably too late for a German
victory to prevent the social disintegration of at least Eastern Europe.
The Russian Revolution was imminent, and with the death of the Emperor
Franz Josef in December 1916 the Habsburg Monarchy was widely
regarded as unrescuable. Within Germany itself, the Reichstag Peace
Resolution of summer 1917 showed that political disintegration had
gone so far that even total military victory could not have prevented

12. Avner Offer, The First World War: An Agrarian Interpretation (Oxford,
1989). Offner's interpretation, based as it is on the "mind-set" of the British ruling
classes, seems to me overly subtle. British blockade strategy in fact, followed
traditional lines that required little adjustment to deal with the special circumstances
of the First World War.
13. This has in fact been done by Gerhard Ritter in Vol. 3 of his study The
Sword and the Sceptre: The Problem of Militarism in Germany, 4 vols. (Coral
Gables, Fla., 1969-73).
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HOWARD

vast postwar political turmoil. The effects of two years of attritional

strategy were irreversible, irrespective of who now won the war.

In dealing with that attritional strategy, military historians have on

the whole been as unhappy as the commanders whose operations they
have described. For the latter, there was always a large measure of
ambiguity. Von Falkenhayn at Verdun found it impossible to translate
his strategic concept of inflicting crippling losses on the French while
minimizing those of the Germans into operational reality. Indeed, he
failed to make his subordinate commanders understand the nature of
his object at all.14 In the same way, as we have already seen, there was
within the British High Command a fundamental ambiguity about the
object of the Battle of the Somme, as indeed about most of the further
offensives on the Western Front. Most of the army commanders concerned, especially Rawlinson and Plumer, saw the offensives as aiming
at limited objectives to be gained by maximum use of firepower in
order gradually to erode enemy strength with minimal losses to the
attackers.15 But Haig, while paying lip-service to these objectives, still
thought in terms of an operational strategy aimed at seizing military
objectives far behind the lines. And indeed it is difficult for field commanders to devise plans and to motivate their troops without being
given some kind of operational objective. It is not easy to accept the
harsh fact that the process of fighting in itself and the killing off of the
enemy is more important than any physical objective to be attained.
For whatever reason, British military historians describing the Battle
of the Somme, and indeed the fighting on the Western Front in general,
have found it difficult to focus on an analysis of the operations themselves.
They have let themselves be diverted, either upwards to a discussion of
high strategy and a debate over the rationale for those operations; or
downward, to compiling battlefield memoirs and analyzing the nature
of trench warfare. It is only during the last ten years or so that we have
seen serious operational analyses, focussing on the technical problems
as they presented themselves to commanders at different levels, by
historians such as the Canadian T. H. Travers and the Australians
Trevor Wilson and Robin Prior.16 They have given us a far deeper
understanding than have any previous historians of the true nature of
those campaigns, of the varying degree of competence of the generals
14. See Alistair Horne, The Price of Glory: Verdun, 1916 (New York, 1978).
15. See Wilson and Prior, Command on the Western Front.
16. Ibid. T. H. Travers, The Killing Ground: The British Army, the Western
Front and the Emergence of Modern Warfare, 1900-1918 (New York, 1987).
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concerned, and of the enormous organizational complexity involved in
their planning and execution. After reading them we can better appreciate the professional qualities, as well as the cultural and other limitations, of the commanders involved.
But even these works still leave open the question: how far did the
attacks on the Western Front achieve their objective in terms of the
attrition they inflicted? A study of success or failure in terms of ground
gained or comparative casualties suffered-a matter over which the
British official historians agonized for years-does not in itself get us
very far. Behind such statistics lie the deeper questions, whether comparable casualties could have been inflicted with less cost; whether greater
operational skill might have rendered it unnecessary to resort to such a
strategy at all; and-a question that takes us beyond the competence of
what role this attrition on the
military historians as such-precisely
battlefield played in the overall weakening of the Central Powers and in
the eventual collapse of their societies.
For while the Western allies, in particular the British, were exhausting
themselves by a strategy of attrition, the Germans were reinventing a
strategy of manoeuvre; or rather, tactics that made such a strategy once
more possible. In the spring offensives of 1918 they used them to
shatter the Allied lines in the West. Again, we look to military historians
to explain how they did this and, yet more important, why the Allies
had not developed such tactics sooner, and rendered unnecessary the
bloodletting of 1916 and 1917. But here again, the full explanation
cannot be provided by the military historian. It requires a profounder
understanding of the nature of German society and that of its adver-

saries.17
Even so, a final paradox remains. Why did Ludendorff not use his
rediscovered operational skills in a true strategy of manoeuvre directed
against a key objective such as Paris, or Allied communications with the
Channel ports? Why instead did he launch that series of uncoordinated
attacks with the general attritional objective of weakening Allied morale
and making them friedensbereit, ready for peace? Why did he not
revert to the traditional operational goal of using his forces to obtain
decisive victory in the field, when it appeared, for the first time since
1914, to lie in his power? The explanation for that decision perhaps also
lies beyond the competence of the purely military historian.
As for the final Allied offensives of 1918, these are treated all too
often in histories of the war (though not of course by Americans) as a
17. Bruce Gudmundsson, Stormtroop Tactics: Innovation in the German
Army, 1900-1918 (New York, 1989). See also Michael Geyer, "German Strategy in
the Age of Machine Warfare, 1914-1945," in Peter Paret, ed., Makers of Modern
Strategyfrom Machiavelli to the Nuclear Age (Princeton, 1986).
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kind of anticlimax after the drama of the failed German offensives; a

mere following up of an exhausted enemy, rather than the skilful
exercise of hard-won skills by armies that had painfully learned their
trade over the past four years and were now being commanded with
considerable competence. Even so, in spite of their successes, those
armies still did not achieve a clear operational decision in the field; and
to assess the impact of their victories on German public opinion, on the
morale of the German forces, and on the decisions of the German High
Command, we have to turn away yet again from the sphere of military
history and ask the general historian to tell us about developments on
the domestic front. The analysis of the causes of Germany's collapse
demands an expertise at least as far-ranging as does that of the causes of
the war itself.18
We can end only with the banal conclusion that in dealing with a
conflict as total in its ramifications as the First World War the military
historian can operate only as part of a team; playing a central and
indispensable role, but providing explanations that themselves are only
partial and need to be seen in a far broader context than the operational
activities they describe. Indeed a fully adequate history of that war can
probably only be written by a general historian who has taken the
trouble to acquire as full an expertise in military and naval affairs as he
possesses in political, social and economic matters. In the opinion of
the present writer, such a maestro has yet to be found.

18. There are of course many studies of this. The starting point must be the
documentary collection by R. H. Lutz, The Fall of the German Empire 1914-1918,
2 vols. (New York, 1969).
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