The Guns of August Read Free

oppressed him, or whether all along beneath his bold words and manner the natural juices of courage had been invisibly drying up … no one who has not been in the same position can judge.”
    Barbara Tuchman wrote history to tell the story of human struggle, achievement, frustration, and defeat, not to draw moral conclusions. Nevertheless,
The Guns of August
offers lessons. Foolish monarchs, diplomats, and generals blundered into a war nobody wanted, an Armageddon which evolved with the same grim irreversability as a Greek tragedy. “In the month of August, 1914,” she wrote, “there was something looming, inescapable, universal that involved us all. Something in that awful gulf between perfect plans and fallible men that makes one tremble with a sense of ‘There but for the Grace of God go we.’” Her hope was that people reading her book might take warning, avoid these mistakes, and do a little better. It was this effort and these lessons which attracted presidents and prime ministers as well as millions of ordinary readers.
    Family and work dominated Barbara Tuchman’s life. What gave her the most pleasure was to sit at a table, writing. She permitted no distractions. Once, after she was famous, her daughter Alma told her that Jane Fonda and Barbra Streisand wanted her to write a movie script. She shook her head. “But, Ma,” said Alma, “don’t you even want to meet Jane Fonda?” “Oh, no,” said Mrs. Tuchman. “I don’t have time. I’m working.” She wrote her first drafts in longhand on a yellow legal pad with “everything messed up and x’d out and inserted.” She followed with drafts on the typewriter, triple-spaced, ready to be scissored apart and Scotch-taped back together in a different sequence. Customarily, she worked for four or five hours at a stretch, without interruption. “The summer she was finishing
The Guns of August,
” her daughter Jessica remembers, “she was behind schedule and desperate to catch up … To get away from the telephone she set up a card table and a chair in an old dairy attached to the stables—a room that was cold even in summer. She would go to work at 7:30 A.M. My job was to bring her lunch on a tray at 12:30 P.M. —a sandwich, V-8 juice, a piece of fruit. Every day, approaching silently on the pine needles that surrounded the stables, I’d find her in the same position, always engrossed. At 5 P.M. or so she stopped.”
    One of the paragraphs Barbara Tuchman wrote that summer took her eight hours to complete and became the most famous passage in all her work. It is the opening paragraph of
The Guns of August
which begins “So gorgeous was the spectacle on the May morning of 1910 …” By turning the page, the fortunate person who has not yet encountered this book can begin to read.
    —Robert K. Massie

Preface
    T HE GENESIS OF THIS BOOK lies in two earlier books I wrote, of which the First World War was the focal point of both. The first was
Bible and Sword,
about the origins of the Balfour Declaration issued in 1917 in anticipation of the British entry into Jerusalem in the course of the war against Turkey in the Middle East. As the center and source of the Judaeo-Christian religion, and incidentally of the Moslem as well, although that was a matter of lesser concern at the time, the taking of the sacred city was felt to be an awesome moment requiring some major gesture to accompany it and provide a fitting moral foundation. An official statement recognizing Palestine as the national homeland of the original inhabitants was conceived to fulfill the need, not in consequence of any philo-Semitism but in consequence rather of two other factors: the influence in British culture of the Bible, especially the Old Testament, and a twin influence in that year of what the
Manchester Guardian
called “the insistent logic of the military situation on the banks of the Suez Canal,” in short,
Bible and Sword.
    The second of the two books preceding
The Guns
was
The