Margaret MacMillan, a Canadian historian at the University of Oxford, has already tackled contentious topics. Such losses had seemed unthinkable when the war began.Īll of which is to say that anyone writing on 1914, particularly with the centenary approaching next year, better have nerves of steel. While Britain, France and Germany lost between 2 and 3 percent of their total populations, Serbia suffered a staggering 15 percent depletion. For some countries the burden was greater than others. The conflict claimed 20 million military and civilian lives, with a further 21 million wounded. “Loss of a generation” was a lament heard around Europe when the war was over. The scale of the disaster that followed the events of August 1914 complicates the historian’s task. Despite these bold and often compelling accounts, the case remains unsettled. Of recent scholarship, Max Hastings backs Fischer in holding Germany responsible Sean McMeekin argues it was Russia’s fault Niall Ferguson points the finger at Britain while Christopher Clark shows Europe “sleepwalking” into war. Historians since have all weighed in on the blame game. His hugely controversial account, “Germany’s Aims in the First World War,” published in English in 1967, accused Germany of intentionally starting the war. Where Tuchman influenced President Kennedy and the popular imagination, Fritz Fischer, a year earlier, had become the touchstone for historians. “I am not,” the president told his brother Bobby, “going to follow a course which will allow anyone to write a comparable book about this time: ‘The Missiles of October.’ ” It was still on his mind as he confronted the Cuban missile crisis. The book inspired Kennedy to install a tape system in the White House, including the Oval Office, to ensure an accurate record of decision-making. The anecdote about World War I came from Barbara Tuchman’s best-selling history “The Guns of August,” in which Tuchman explored the immediate origins and first weeks of the war. Kennedy once remarked that “in 1914, with most of the world already plunged in war, Prince Bulow, the former German chancellor, said to the then-chancellor Bethmann-Hollweg: ‘How did it all happen?’ And Bethmann-Hollweg replied: ‘Ah, if only one knew.’ If this planet is ever ravaged by nuclear war,” Kennedy went on, “if the survivors of that devastation can then endure the fire, poison, chaos and catastrophe, I do not want one of those survivors to ask another, ‘How did it all happen?’ and to receive the incredible reply, ‘Ah, if only one knew.’ ”
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