Von Hötzendorff’s Desire

Margaret MacMillan

  • Cataclysm: The First World War as Political Tragedy by David Stevenson
    Basic Books, 564 pp, £26.50, June 2004, ISBN 0 465 08184 3

The Great War seems far off, the world before 1914 even further. We find it hard to believe that men and women cheered in the streets as Europe lurched towards war that July, that the men who poured onto the battlefields in their millions talked the language of duty, and that Canadians, New Zealanders and Australians travelled across the world to help the ‘mother country’. Perhaps that is why the books and documentaries spill out and so many tourists make the trip to the cemeteries and battlefields of the Western Front.

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[*] Simon and Schuster, 350 pp., £15.99, October, 0 743239 60 1.

[†] Heinemann, 349 pp., £20, September, 0 434 00858 3.