“The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914”, by Christopher Clark

 

‎ Harper Perennial, 736 pages, ISBN-13: 978-0061146664

The brilliance of Christopher Clark’s far-reaching The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914 is that he displays with a novelist’s flair just how the past can be prologue. The participants in the first, great calamity of the 20^th Century were conditioned to keep walking along a precipitous escarpment – always certain of the righteousness of their cause – but unknowingly impelled by a complex interaction of deep-rooted cultures, patriotism and paranoia, sediments of history and folk memory, ambition and intrigue. They were, to use Clark’s phrase, “sleepwalkers, watchful but unseeing, haunted by dreams, yet blind to the reality of the horror they were about to bring into the world”. While the historiography of World War I is immense (with more than 25,000 volumes and articles even before the centenary), Clark offers new perspectives on this most useless of wars, giving us a thoroughly comprehensible and highly readable account of the polarization of the continent and insights as to how and why the major players behaved as they did.

Given all that we now know, The Sleepwalkers is like a kind of ‘B’ horror movie: Can’t they hear the music? Don’t they know not to walk down a long back-lit hall? While Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophia died almost instantly, Gavrilo Princip, their adolescent assassin, was instantly captured but not executed as he was too young; instead, he was sent to the Austrian fortress at Terezin, where he died miserably in April 1918 (incidentally, his prison is better known today as the concentration camp of Theresienstadt, where visitors can see his cell and his manacles amid the detritus of the Holocaust that he did a great deal to make possible). But Clark in fact begins his account in 1903 with the murder of Alexander I of Serbia by a secretive terrorist network called the Black Hand, who then went on to organize the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo in 1914 – which resulted ultimately in the bloodbaths of the Somme, Verdun, Gallipoli and the lot. How one bullet could wrought so much suffering…

Germany has usually been blamed for escalating the conflict, but Clark refuses to play the blame game, arguing that the Germans were not alone in their paranoid imperialism. The more convincing and terrifying reality is that no nation really meant to wage war, but each sleepwalked into it. Clark brilliantly puts this illogical conflict into context, showing how pre-1914 Europe was inherently unstable, riven by ethnic and nationalistic factions. The only part of Clark’s analysis of the force fields of European political culture on the eve of the final crisis I find unconvincing is his discussion of what he calls a “crisis of masculinity”: “a preference for unyielding forcefulness over the suppleness, tactical flexibility and wiliness exemplified by an earlier generation of statesmen ... was likely to accentuate the potential for conflict”. It’s hard to say whether Bismarck was more secure in his masculinity than von Moltke, but problems with masculinity have been at the heart of war since Eden; I doubt they were more critical in July 1914 than at any other time.

The beauty of Clark’s final two hundred pages is in the care, intelligence and authority with which he explains how disaster happened; how the crisis in its many forms developed and options for action became ever more limited. Nobody at the time called the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo on June 28^th, 1914, “a shot heard round the world” (filched from Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Concord Hymn), but the phrase epitomizes a judgment that crystallized only as the horrendous sequels played out.