“Bismarck: A Life”, by Jonathan Steinberg

 

592 pages, Oxford University Press, ISBN-13: 978-0199782529

No single person was more responsible for the creation of Germany in 1871 than Otto von Bismarck. First as minister-president of Prussia, then as chancellor of the German Empire, he shaped and guided the creation and development of the country for over a quarter of a century. Yet as Jonathan Steinberg points out in the introduction to Bismarck: A Life, he was a ruler without any sort of sovereignty or popular support, a fact that makes his achievement all the more remarkable. How Bismarck came to occupy this role and stamp his will on Germany is detailed in this perceptive book, which provides an understanding of his achievements within the context of his life and times.

Little about Bismarck's early years indicated the outsize role he would play in history. Born to a Prussian landowning family, he benefited from the opportunities open to him as a member of the Junker class. Drawn to politics in his early thirties, he soon made a name for himself as a staunch supporter of the Prussian king, Frederick William IV, and in 1851 was named the Prussian representative to the Diet of the German Confederation. It was here that he developed his famous pragmatism as a politician, as well as fostering an image of recklessness he felt would serve him well in his political dealings. Yet he desired to be at the heart of power, and he succeeded in winning appointment as Prussia's Minister-President in 1862 thanks to the active support of Albrecht von Roon and other members of a conservative camarilla.

Once in power, Bismarck began a remarkable transformation of European politics. The key to his power, as Steinberg notes, lay not with party support or military backing, but from his ability to dominate Frederick William's brother and successor, William I. With the king's backing, Bismarck was able to remake the map of Europe, forging the German Empire from the disparate states that survived the Napoleonic era. Yet the governing system he constructed was one designed to maximize his authority as chancellor, thwarting the demands of liberal politicians for a greater voice in parliamentary democracy. This system proved to be a double-edged sword, however, as Bismarck found out when William's grandson, William II, ultimately took the throne. Lacking the hold that he had on the new emperor's grandfather, Bismarck's resignation was finally accepted in 1890, leaving the governing power of the advanced industrial state in the hands of a mercurial young monarch and his independent and assertive military.

Steinberg's book is an excellent account of Bismarck's life and times. He offers a fascinating portrait of a dramatic politician who dominated the politics of his nation as few have before or since. By setting Bismarck's life into the context of its times, he demonstrates well the impact Bismarck's policies had - for better and for worse - on the development of Germany as a nation. Unfortunately, this does come at a cost, as Bismarck's private life is generally given short shrift outside of its impact upon his temperament, but such a sacrifice is understandable given the challenge of summarizing such a long career within the confines of a single volume. Steinberg succeeds in providing readers with what is likely to be the best single-volume biography of the "Iron Chancellor" for decades to come, one that should be read by anyone seeking to understand this fascinating and important figure.

"Three Armies on the Somme: The First Battle of the Twentieth Century", by William Philpott

 

656 pages, Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., ISBN-13: 978-0307265852

William Philpott's Three Armies on the Somme: The First Battle of the Twentieth Century is an outstanding example of historical revisionism at its finest. In the course of 656 pages he not only manages to provide an extremely readable account of the Somme Campaign, but he also brings to light the heretofore nearly unknown (and largely successful) contributions of the French Army to the battle. If this were all he did, Philpott's book would be a worthwhile read, but he goes even further to provide an excellent account of the strategic context of the Somme Campaign (which lasted some 140 days, from July 1st, 1916 to November 18th, 1916). A myriad of factors which shaped the Allied strategy are described and put in the proper context, including the German offensive at Verdun, the state of training of the British Army and the French Army's creation of an effective offensive doctrine. Philpott also examines why the Somme was sine qua non not only to the German withdrawal to the Hindenburg Line in the Spring of 1917, but to the ultimate Allied victory in November of 1918.

While previous histories have documented the missteps of British command, no account has fully recognized the fact that allied generals were witnessing the spontaneous evolution of warfare even as they sent their troops “over the top”. With his keen insight and vast knowledge of military strategy, Philpott shows that 20th Century warfare as we know it simply didn’t exist before the Battle of the Somme: new technologies like the armored tank made their battlefield debut, while developments in communications lagged behind commanders’ needs. Attrition emerged as the only means of defeating industrialized belligerents that were mobilizing all their resources for war. At the Somme, the allied armies acquired the necessary lessons of modern warfare, without which they could never have prevailed.  

The author considers the planning, the changes in planning and the strategy of the Entente and the Central Powers, leading to attrition being used on a wide scale. He argues the pros and cons of what went wrong, including, the chances of a breakthrough on the Somme, and persuasively shows exactly what went right for the Entente and why the Somme Campaign features some of the most important battles ever fought, even though the political actors at the time exploited the battle or failed to see that, while it damaged their forces, the German Army was crushed and only depth, quality, availability of men and material, inertia and lack of initiative kept it from being destroyed.

Finally, the book looks at how the Somme is perceived since 1916 and how that effects our historical understanding of what actually happened and what people who fought there thought they were doing. Before the Somme, the Western Front was a siege war which could have lasted far longer than it did; after the Somme, the war became more mobile as first the French and later the British, Germans and Americans adopted use of massive firepower and large sector advances to defeat the enemy, leading to the end the war.

"The Tyrannicide Brief: The Story of the Man Who Sent Charles I to the Scaffold", by Geoffrey Robertson

 

448 pages, Pantheon Books, ISBN-13: 978-1400044511

Geoffrey Robertson has a long and distinguished record as a barrister in the field of human rights, and in The Tyrannicide Brief: The Story of the Man Who Sent Charles I to the Scaffold he turns constitutional historian to raise awareness of the significance of one John Cooke for English legal history. It is startling to realize that the only written constitution England has ever had was a republican one, for the duration of Cromwell's Protectorate 1649-1660. Its roots were shallow, and its fate was sealed with the death of Cromwell himself during a ferocious storm in 1658, widely touted as an omen. Nevertheless, the law and polity of England under the Stuart kings were a sickening morass: James I, founder of the dynasty, had indoctrinated his son Charles from boyhood with the doctrine of Divine Right, under which the monarch was allegedly above the law. This convenient theology was understood by Charles, literally and unquestioningly. He did not even pretend to think that his agreements were binding on himself; he was unencumbered by scruples in the matter of raising taxation, he was indifferent to the death of one in every ten of his male subjects in the civil wars that he incited and, when pressed on such matters at his trial, he asserted sublimely that he embodied the security of his people, whatever this concept may have conveyed to him. 

Robertson writes as an advocate: he is not trying to rescue Cooke's reputation, Cooke having very little reputation in the first place (if Cooke had significant character-defects, we don't read about them here and he emerges as something of a secular saint). However, the basic objective seems to be to argue for Cooke's unrecognized importance in the precedents he set. English Common Law is all based on case-law and precedent. I'm not myself clear to what extent Cooke's judgments stuck for posterity, but in the least he is presented as having a mind-set ahead of his time. A liberal lawyer of our era has recognized a kindred spirit in a less enlightened age; indeed, some of Cooke's views verge on welfare socialism with legal aid for the poor and something like a health service (unsurprisingly, this did not make him popular with everyone). Giving judgments in favor of tenants in Ireland didn't endear him to the rapacious landlords whose ideas of their own rights in this matter were the mirror-image of the King's. Belief in religious tolerance upset those who had recruited the Creator of Heaven and Earth to their own vested interest or at least to their own ideas of how He ought to see the matter. The Protectorate was certainly an improvement on the Stuarts in the matter of basic fairness, but Cooke was always a bit of a loner, and to stigmatize him as "radical" (on top of his obscure origins) was condemnation enough for the self-complacent and partisan.

Cooke's rigid belief in due legal process led him to accept as his duty the prosecution of the King when barristers of greater eminence wisely took cover. Robertson recounts the trial as a professional and connoisseur, and trials make good drama. Charles was well advised, and it is beyond a legal layman to judge of the legitimacy of the arguments by which Cooke prevailed. Trials under the Stuarts, with their packed, suborned and bullied juries and their rigging of the law, are a clear affront to ordinary human notions of equity, but it's hard to see that the King's trial was any model of modern rectitude or due process, either, and Robertson seems to me to sail perilously close to arguing "That's just the way it had to be". His prejudices are basically mine too, but that is not really the issue. The doctrine that national leaders are above the law was later re-enshrined in the Treaty of Westphalia, and it took new legal ingenuity to get around that when it came to the post-WWII trials (indeed, at the trial of the Japanese leaders the Indian judge dissented from all the guilty verdicts as being victors' justice). 

Part of Robertson's own self-brief is to measure Charles' trial against those of modern monsters. How the trial of Saddam Hussein may have concluded is anyone's guess, but conventional thought in 1649 dictated that if the prisoner refused to enter a plea then that was equated with an admission of guilt, and this cramped Cooke's style. Robertson rightly commends Richard May for directing a plea of not-guilty to be recorded when Milosevic took the same line of refusing to recognize the court, but faults him for allowing an indictment so long that the trial promised to go on indefinitely, this being an error that the King's judges had avoided. The Tyrannicide Brief makes for an excellent read for a layman: it is patently fair and the partisanship, though obvious, is rational. How it will all play out for the next putative King Charles, I can't tell, but I suggest this book for the defendant's reading list.

“The Longest Night: A Military History of the Civil War”, by David John Eicher

 

992 pages, Simon & Schuster, Inc., ISBN-13: 978-0684849454

Although I have read many books on the Civil War, The Longest Night: A Military History of the Civil War by David John Eicher is perhaps the best single volume (actually big enough for two) history on the American Civil War. This book will appeal to someone who has not had the opportunity to appreciate the complex nature of the war that spread completely across the country from Virginia in the East to Fort Craig, New Mexico in the far west, from Robert E. Lee to Kit Carson. While there may not be new ground for the seasoned CW veteran reader, there is no doubt that this book will appeal to an aspiring CW historian that wants the total picture of what occurred during the war.

Eicher provides detail on virtually every major battle, including substantial skirmishes, along with the identification of every major General, down to the division level with short biographical sketches on the main participants. The detail is somewhat overwhelming, but for seasoned CW readers, there is some useful material as one can actually follow the names of generals that disappeared or were banished from the eastern theater, such as Magruder, Slocum, Hooker, Rosecrans, Butler, Pleasonton, Loring, Colquitt, D. H. Hill, Holmes, and so on. In addition, Eicher clarifies the true rank status of Generals, provides historical updates such as the recent discovery of the Hundley and maintains an objective point of view, particularly on Grant, Sherman, Longstreet, Forrest and many others.

Although descriptions of the major battles are somewhat difficult, due to the compressed nature of this single volume (as all CW books would benefit from maps galore to understand troop movements), the best part of this big book are the descriptions of raids, small battles such as Ball's Bluff and other interesting actions, such as the daring sinking of the ironclad "Albemarle" by Lt. Cushing, with his nighttime mission involving a small sleek boat with a torpedo as a spar. Eicher even includes details on the Vermont bank raids by Confederates, the attempts to burn NYC and Confederate attempts to spread yellow fever. There are some small mistakes to be found, such as the author siting Booth's death near Port Tobacco he meant Port Royal (or maybe that was the original name) and there may be others - I wasn't aware that Picket had 19,000 men at Five Forks (with a number that large it seems that A. P. Hill should have commanded it).

This is a huge book that takes some patience to read and it sometimes is tedious in detail but even for a veteran CW buff it can be rewarding. For the CW veteran it may be like a referee rereading the rules to see if you really do know it all.

“Heroes: Saviours, Traitors and Supermen”, by Lucy Hughes-Hallett

496 pages, Viking Press, ISBN-13: 978-0670063642

What is it about heroes, anyway? We love them, at least for a while; then we discover they have feet of clay, and we'd just as soon they relocate or die. In Lucy Hughes-Hallett's book, she explores the universal human desire for heroes, both "to acknowledge its urgency, and to warn against it". From her perspective, heroes are problematic: not merely are they those who rise to deal with difficult or impossible situations, but also those who inspire terrorists and smooth the way for dictators and tyrants. In Heroes: Saviours, Traitors and Supermen, Hughes-Hallett takes a closer look at eight men (the Magnificent Eight, as it were) from distant antiquity (if not fiction) up until the recent past. She examines the exploits of names which still resonate with many people: the legendary figure Achilles; Roman senator Cato the Younger; the Athenian general (and betrayer) Alcibades; the crusading Spanish warlord El Cid; the pirate Francis Drake; war plunderer Albrecht von Wallenstein; the mythical Odysseus; and revolutionary Giuseppe Garibaldi. Plumbing the depths of historical record, she recounts with gusto (and considerable wit) each man's triumphs and failings.

She identifies in all of these examples both the powerful attraction of heroes and the dangerous undercurrents which travel with their oversized personal presence. One must remember, as Hughes-Hallett does, that there was a reason Jason and the Argonauts left Hercules behind: "so that the Argos would not have on board one so vastly bigger than the rest of the crew". As Bertolt Brecht wrote, it is an unhappy land that looks for heroes, and the idea that "cometh the hour, cometh the man" can sometimes mean that the man that cometh brings a fair amount of baggage with him. For Hughes-Hallett, heroism becomes less a subjective mediation on heroes as the proverbial "good role model" and more an identification of the traits that cause certain people to challenge the notion that all men are created equal. Here, a hero need not be virtuous or even valiant by modern standards; instead, they need only "inspire confidence and appear, not good necessarily, but great".

Perhaps principal among the heroic traits she identifies as common is an ability to inspire others to move beyond themselves, as well as an unwillingness to compromise - indeed, many heroic figures exhibit "a disdain for the cramping compromises by means of which the unheroic majority manage their lives". In this regard we see both Achilles and Cato the Younger as examples: each held true to his own course and steadfastly refused to live his life by any other standard than his own. For Cato, that meant doing everything within his power to forestall the slide of the Roman Republic into an Empire and rejecting any form of compromise which might have avoided a bloody civil war which led, inexorably, to his own suicide and his subsequent elevation as an enduring example of Stoic resistance to the cloying entanglements and emotional confusion that affects "lesser men".

Hughes-Hallett notes that heroes are frequently unable to exist within the confines of mundane life; they often only flourish in the midst of specific difficult circumstances. Intriguingly, she notes that much as there are two Homeric epics, there are two models of Heroism: Achilles, with whom she opens the book; and Odysseus, to whom she gives the last word. There are fundamental differences between them: "Achilles values prizes only for the honor they represent, but Odysseus wants to get rich: he is a looter and pillager like the Cid, an unprovoked raider of peaceful settlements like Drake". More, Achilles tells the truth regardless of the circumstance (much like Cato the Younger), while Odysseus is far more willing to bend the truth to serve the needs of the moment. Regardless, they are both outsized personalities capable of great feats. But there is in Odysseus something which seems more "human" than in Achilles' adherence to his code; and for some reason, it is Odysseus who is also more than a hero: he is a husband, father and landowner, and as Hughes-Hallett puts it, "Homer's Odysseus comes home at last, to lie with Penelope in a great bed made from a living tree". He is a person heroic enough not to die, but to live, at last, a normal life.

All in all, I thought Hughes-Hallett presented her characters and her arguments in a refreshingly clear and coherent manner, and Heroes was an engaging, thought-provoking exploration of what defines a "hero" in the broad sense, as well as outlining both the attraction and the dangerous undercurrents associated with such "larger-than-life" figure.

"Peter the Great: His Life and World", by Robert K. Massie

 

909 pages, Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., ISBN-13: 978-0394500324

Robert K. Massie became one of my go-to historians, meaning that I will buy anything with his name on it. Peter the Great: His Life and World is a thoroughly enjoyable book about the life and personality of the man who opened Russia to the West and and the challenges he faced in trying to make Russia a major power on the European stage of the 18th Century. Although Peter is accurately described as being a driven, uncompromising, and oftentimes ruthless man, this book also presents his softer, warmer side that usually opened up only to his second wife Catherine and to his inner group of trusted friends. In reading the biography of Peter, a great deal of insight is also gained into the society and politics of 17th-18th Century Russia and Europe, which in the hands of any other historian might be written in a dry and abstract manner. With Massie, however, he has such an engaging narrative style that the book reads like an action novel at times (such as in describing the Battle of Poltava).

The book starts with the Russia that Peter was born into, a Russia still very much steeped in the deep middle ages of superstition and religious fundamentalism. His father Tsar Alexis and the his mother Tsaritsa Natalya doted on him as well as his sickly half brother Ivan (his later co-Tsar until he died at age 29), and from the very beginning the young prince showed that he was made of special stuff. The untimely death of his father, his days at Preobrazhenskoe playing soldier as a boy (the Preobrazhenskoe regiment was the automatic regiment that all Tsars belonged to until 1917, following the tradition started by Peter), as well as the Strelsky revolt that nearly saw him and his mother slaughtered by the palace guards, all gets illuminated as the main formative events in the young prince's life. Peter's contact with Dutch ship builders in Russia (he initially thought they were German - all foreigners were Germans to Russians in those days) set the course for possibly his greatest achievement: the foundation of the Russian Navy from literally nothing at all to a force rivaling Sweden and Denmark in the Baltic Sea. This chance meeting on the Russian steppes that had such enormous repercussion for Russia finally gets the historical attention it deserves in this book.

Each personality of monarchs that Peter dealt with in Europe and the Middle East is given an ample introduction in Massie's book, which is entertaining reading in its own right. For example, we learn that Augustus II, King of Poland and useless ally of Peter in the Great Northern War, was a sexual philanderer of extreme proportions, and that Frederick Wilhelm I, King of Prussia, had his famous collection of giants and suffered from pains that almost drove him to insanity. Of course, a major portion of the book is devoted to the conflict between Peter and his archnemesis Charles XII in the Great Northern War. Massie recounts how Charles' fanaticism and his legendary aura of invincibility eventually brought the Swedish empire to its knees.

Peter the Great represents Peter as he was: a violent man when circumstances demanded it - even brutal - but always purposeful, never like the wasteful madness of Ivan IV (the Terrible). He achieved remarkable things in a short space of time, but he was also guilty of actions that were effective in its results but with methods most decent people in our time can only condemn (torture was an effective political instrument in Peter's eyes). Luckily, he is not judged by the author according to 20th Century morals, as often happens in these type of books. Again, the troubling recognition that history cares more for results than the moral modes of a given time confronts us in these pages, but after completing Massie's biography, one can't help but admire Peter the Great and all he did.

"Nicholas and Alexandra: In Intimate Account of the Last of the Romanovs and the Fall of Imperial Russia", by Robert K. Massie

 

584 pages, Atheneum, ISBN-13: 978-1122359351

When this book first appeared in 1967, nothing anything like it had ever existed before. There were the original emigré accounts, most of them written in the 1920's and 1930's, which contained personal memories of the last tsar and his family from many points of view, and there were the other historical sources which gave, for example, descriptions of Russian and European society in the time of Nicholas II, along with depictions of the cataclysmic events of war, revolution and regicide. But there was no biography of the man or his family.

The real brilliance of Robert K. Massie's Nicholas and Alexandra: In Intimate Account of the Last of the Romanovs and the Fall of Imperial Russia lies in the fact that he was able to weave these far-flung historical narratives into an intensely readable and informative whole, in the process resurrecting the last Tsar and his family from the murky mists of time which had made them all but vanish from the attention of the world. A whole Romanov industry exists today, producing several new books on this tragic family every year, but the public's fascination with this field, however, must surely be traced back to Massie's astonishing book. It is a work of nearly faultless scholarship, fidelity to historical sources, and deeply moving human interest. It is unthinkable that one should let one's life pass by and leave this book unread.

The way the book is written gives both the perspectives of a government in decay, complete with the political circumstances and key political figures of the time. However, the book often drifts off: through the snow covered capital of St. Petersburg, to the ice cold walls of the Alexander Palace, where Nicholas II and Empress Alexandra became simply Nicky and Alix. In their private world at Tsarskoe Selo, the titles of "Their Imperial Majesties the Grand Duchess" and the Tsaravich simply became those names of children, from Olga to Alexis.

From their days at the Alexander Palace, Massie brought us up close to not only the Tsaravich's struggle with hemophilia, but also the struggle of a mother, Alexandra, who had to bare it all by her son's side. Into this family tragedy came in the (in my opinion) intolerable abomination of a man the world knows as Rasputin. The way Massie wrote of the influence of Rasputin on Alexandra, and hence the influence on government, which led to the collapse of Imperial Russia, one clearly sees the faults that are shown within the Empress and her ineptitude in running an empire. However, at the same time, one feels for her and pays special attention to her religious beliefs, which influence much of the final outcome of her greatest mistake.

Finally, Massie depicts the final collapse of Imperial Russia, concisely and tragically. This eventually leads to the imprisonment and final execution of the last Tsar, Autocrat of All the Russians, and his family. The breathtaking detail and account of their murder is extremely unsettling. One may think that reading of simply a murder, one of many, is not so great a shock, yet, as one has read this book from the very beginning, one has gotten to know, personally, the Imperial family, and cannot help but pity them.