The Guns of August Read Free Page B

contained all the roots, including the
Goeben and
the Battle of Mons, to make us both happy, the project began to seem feasible.
    When mired among all those Roman-numeraled corps and left and right flanks, I soon felt out of my depth and felt I should have gone to Staff and Command School for ten years before undertaking a book of this kind, especially when trying to tell how the French on the defensive managed to regain Alsace at the very beginning, which I never did understand but I managed to weave my way in and around it, a maneuverone learns in the process of writing history—to muffle the facts a bit when one can’t understand everything—watch Gibbon do it in those sonorous balanced sentences which, if you analyze them, often turn out to make little sense, but you forget that in the marvel of their structure. I am no Gibbon, but I have learned the value of venturing into the unfamiliar instead of returning to a field of previous study where one already knows the source material and all the persons and circumstances. To do the latter makes the work certainly easier, but removes any sense of discovery and surprise, which is why I like moving to a new subject for a new book. Though it may distress the critics, it pleases me. Since I was hardly known to the critics when
The Guns
was published, with no reputation for them to enjoy smashing, the book received instead the warmest reception. Clifton Fadiman wrote in the Book-of-the-Month Club bulletin: “One must be careful with the big words. Still, there is a fair chance that
The Guns of August
may turn out to be a historical classic. Its virtues are almost Thucydidean: intelligence, concision, weight detachment. Dealing with the days preceding and following the outbreak of the First World War, its subject like that of Thucydides goes beyond the limited scope and reach of the mere narrative. For in hard, sculptured prose this book fixes the moments that have led inexorably to our own time. It places our dread day in long perspective, arguing that if most of the world’s men, women and children are soon to be burned to atoms, the annihilation would seem to proceed directly out of the mouths of the guns that spoke in August 1914. This may be an oversimplification but it describes the author’s thesis which she presents with deadly quiet. It is her conviction that the deadlock of the terrible month of August determined the future course of the war and the terms of the peace, the shape of the inter-war period and the conditions of the Second Round.”
    He then went on to describe the main actors in the narrative, saying that “one of the marks of the superior historian is the ability to project human beings as well as events,” and hepicked out the salient characters—the Kaiser, King Albert, generals Joffre and Foch, among others, just as I had tried to convey them, which made me feel I had succeeded in what I intended. I was so moved by Fadiman’s understanding, not to mention being compared to Thucydides, that I found myself in tears, a reaction that I have never known again. To elicit perfect comprehension is perhaps to be expected only once.
    I suppose the important thing to say in introducing an anniversary edition is whether the significance given to it historically holds up. I think it does. There are no passages I would wish to change.
    While the best-known part is the opening scene on the funeral of Edward VII, the closing paragraph of the Afterword expresses for the book, or rather for its subject, the meaning in our history of the Great War. Though it may be presumptuous of me to say so, I think this is as well stated as any summary of World War I that I know.
    On top of Fadiman’s praise came a startling prediction by
Publishers Weekly,
the bible of the book trade.
“The Guns of August,”
it declared, “will be the biggest new nonfiction seller in your winter season.” Carried away by its own superlative,
PW
was led to some rather eccentric prose