Bedford Public Library

The lost history of 1914, reconsidering the year the great war began, Jack Beatty

eng

Includes bibliographical references (p. [329]-379) and index

mapsillustrations

index present

non fiction

The lost history of 1914

bibliography

776478958

Jack Beatty

reconsidering the year the great war began

In The Lost History of 1914, Jack Beatty offers a highly original view of World War I, testing against fresh evidence the long-dominant assumption that it was inevitable. "Most books set in 1914 map the path leading to war," Beatty writes. "This one maps the multiple paths that led away from it." Chronicling largely forgotten events faced by each of the belligerent countries in the months before the war started in August, Beatty shows how any one of them-a possible military coup in Germany; an imminent civil war in Britain; the murder trial of the wife of the likely next premier of France, who sought d?tente with Germany-might have derailed the war or brought it to a different end. In Beatty's hands, these stories open into epiphanies of national character, and offer dramatic portraits of the year's major actors-Kaiser Wilhelm, Tsar Nicholas II , Woodrow Wilson, along with forgotten or overlooked characters such as Pancho Villa, Rasputin, and Herbert Hoover. Europe's ruling classes, Beatty shows, were so haunted by fear of those below that they mistook democratization for revolution, and were tempted to "escape forward" into war to head it off. Beatty's powerful rendering of the combat between August 1914 and January 1915 which killed more than one million men, restores lost history, revealing how trench warfare, long depicted as death's victory, was actually a life-saving strategy

Germany : saber rule -- Russia : sea of tears -- England : Ulster will fight -- The United States and Mexico : the president and the bandit -- Austria-Hungary : Franz Ferdinand lives : a counterfactual -- France : the wages of imperialism -- The victory of the spade -- Home fronts I -- Home fronts II