The Month that Changed the World: July 1914
Martel (The Origins of the First World War, 1996) scrutinizes the monthlong diplomatic crisis that began with the assassination of Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand and ended with the first volleys of the “war to end all wars.” Given the tangle of treaties, alliances, and variously divergent national interests that gave rise to the crisis, not to mention the great number of individuals involved, it’s an unavoidably complicated story. Historical explanations as to how relatively minor local tensions in the Balkans boiled over into full-scale pan-European war are many, yet given the scope of the carnage that would ensue—9 million people killed and 30 million injured, many horrifically—such explanations often seem insufficient. On this greatest of questions Martel does not claim new clarity, suggesting that there is not, and may never be, a full set of explanations for the choices made in July 1914. Instead, inspired by crime novelist Ian Rankin, whose books demand that the reader be the detective, Martel embraces the complexity of the historical moment and presents a thoroughly (and, at times, bewilderingly) detailed blow-by-blow account of the flurry of diplomatic activity that, despite many opportunities to maintain peace, ultimately plunged the world into war. Readers seeking a more explanatory approach may prefer Christopher Clark’s excellent The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914 (2013), or Barbara Tuchman’s classic The Guns of August (1962), but Martel’s careful, encyclopedic approach deserves to share a shelf with such works. --Brendan Driscoll