July 1914: Countdown to War
McMeekin’s sally into the ever-burgeoning genre of WWI origin stories does not refrain, as does historian Christopher Clark’s The Sleepwalkers, from apportioning blame for the outbreak of the war. This can be a tricky task for historians, complicated by documentary gaps about the July 1914 crisis, which indicate some of the power players involved destroyed or doctored evidence. Historian David Fromkin (Europe’s Last Summer, 2004) seized on this to indict Germany as the primary instigator of WWI. While hardly absolving Germany, McMeekin argues that the principal suspects are the Russian foreign minister, Sergei Sazonov, and the French president, Raymond Poincaré, both of whom also altered evidence during the same period. McMeekin incorporates diplomatic exchanges among the powers, which both acknowledge responsibility and attempt to saddle their opponents with the brunt of it, and grants the Entente powers better success than the Triple Alliance at the high-risk, not to say cynical, operation of assigning blame for starting a continental European war. Alluding to historical controversies, McMeekin ably delivers what readers demand from a WWI-origins history: a taut rendition of the July 1914 crisis. --Gilbert Taylor