The Great War through the People who Shaped and Experienced It Places and the

A century after the War to End All Wars, our 20-20 hindsight allows for an easy contempt which those who lived through the First World War might have gained only at great cost. James Charles Roy’s All the World at War shares that contempt, and at every opportunity skewers those who led the world into a massive, futile conflict whose scars still run deep today. With a century’s worth of already more detailed reminiscences and analysis of the specific battles and campaigns of the War, Roy focuses more on the major characters, the main “People and Places”, often reading more like a military historian’s celebrity gossip magazine than any specifics of military maneuvers.

Roy organizes the war in a series of highlights, diving into each major event and character as he unwraps the war. Passages are not in strict chronological order, but earlier events are presented for sufficient background, with overlapping timed descriptions necessary for Roy’s large scope on the War. Chapters are broken into digestible sections with thorough narratives, spiced with his short, more contemporary visits to sites and modern observations. Roy’s contemporary observations are relevant, informative, and often poignant; lending a link to our times which an otherwise purely historical narrative might lack.

Roy relishes in the enjoyable details of major characters such as Foch, Haig, Ludendorff, Rasputin, Lenin, Lawrence, Clemenceau, Pershing, Wilson, and most other if not all of the most relevant or prominent major characters, from Victoria to Hitler. Meanwhile, descriptions of actual campaigns and battles can be somewhat cursory. For instance, there is a short throwaway line that “token Portuguese troops” always broke and ran (which might be disputed by Portugal’s French Légion d'Honneur recipient Aníbal Milhais who, during the Battle of La Lys, with his Lewis gun covered the withdrawal of Portuguese and Scots soldiers until he ran out of ammunition and was caught behind German lines); while descriptions of certain celebrities’ meals might be more prominent on Roy’s menu. However, Roy’s style flows smoothly and maintains interest throughout, with extensive notes in support (with even more extensive references in pdf free at www.jamescharlesroy.com), and for its scale, plenty of detail for those more focused on biographies than troop movements. Indeed, the endnotes are not simply dry citations but worthy passages in and of themselves. All the World at War provides neat discrete sections describing each major character as they come on stage, allowing the reader to easily peruse the lengthy volume, once its organization is apparent, for nice summaries of the worthy personages.

As the War closes, Roy’s lengthy postscript details the endings of those major characters, with many sunsets often befitting the tragedy and waste of the War itself. In much the same way All the World at War provides useful summaries of the major characters, Roy’s postscripts provide a useful closure for the Great War. There is a reminder that that those powerful and famous are still human, and still subject to the inevitable end of their existence. There is a hint of the coming Second World War, but Roy keeps the focus on the major characters of the First World War.

There are scattered occurrences of sentences with confusing subject pronouns when the number of mentioned personages can lead to ambiguity. And while Roy’s contemporary observations are valuable, they can spring up without notice as a distraction. But perhaps a more serious complaint might be that the contempt for the leadership may be too harsh. Not that the leadership failures are not now fairly obvious, as Roy solidly proves, but that the War may have occurred just at a perfect storm of technological advances, societal transitions, and preexisting conditions, all of which over the leadership would have had little or no control.

While all humans have weaknesses, there may simply have been a confluence of incompetence, at an all too dangerous level, at an all too dangerous time. Roy rightly condemns the leaders and the system which spawned them at the time, but there is little appreciation for what that system had managed to achieve previously. There is a very modern contempt for the “civilization” which was claimed as an excuse for the imperialism and colonialism by the West, but not much genuine acknowledgement of the actual brutality and backwardness of any competing culture. For instance, Roy lays the difficulties of the current Middle East mostly at the feet of the meddling Imperialist West, but surely after decades of independence some of the difficulties might have more indigenous roots. There is an understandable clarity from hindsight, well-supported by Roy’s references to the commoner recordings of participants and deceased who were not as fortunate as the major characters who wrote memoirs to hide their own leadership failures. Roy’s descriptions of the major characters should alert those who over-romanticize the period.

However, the First World War collapsed a system which had been relatively stable across decades. While any period has its brutishness and injustice, for its time the global system admittedly flawed still had produced advances which had enhanced the lives of countless humans. Scientific progress was accelerating; human rights were gaining greater recognition. The fact that leadership principles had not kept pace with technology and society, while tragic, must be observed in the context of those leaders. While we now claim to know the futility and waste of cavalry charges into machine gun killing zones, or how artillery can tear up the ground so badly that infantry become targets mired in mud, or the need for proper preparation of intelligence and logistics for amphibious landings; the fact remains that leaders can only use the experience with which they are familiar. And there was little experience in Europe for the type of warfare of the First World War. Even today, we can easily watch around the world blood and treasure being sent into meatgrinders, and unending conflicts of seemingly pointless resolution. If we humans are still so backwards with ubiquitous internet and constant connectivity underlined by principles of democracy, with the lessons of two world wars; how much more difficulty did the narrow elitist leaders of 1914 have without reliably fast mass communications, more accurate methods of data analysis, and access to global information?

That said, Roy does not shy from the difficulties of the times. For instance, submarine warfare was just being developed, and Roy plainly raises how starvation caused by the Allied naval blockade and unmarked armed merchant ships made the war crime behavior of Germany’s unrestricted submarine warfare somewhat equivalent. Complex railroad schedules, once started for military mobilizations, dared not be disturbed by diplomatic efforts, desperate or otherwise. The aeroplanes of the War were flimsy unreliable vehicles prone to be death traps, with a developing code of combat which would be quickly superseded by new and more lethal designs. In addition, the appeal of Bolshevik communism, not yet proven to be as brutal as any other imperial dictatorship, offered illusory relief to a Russia desperately trapped by a lack of competent leadership.

The lengthy All the World at War does not pretend to be a comprehensive total compendium of the War. Although its final chapters contain worthy conclusions, there is no deep analysis of the War's lasting impact around the world, other than perhaps that associated with Russia and the British Commonwealth, except in the broadest terms. Nor are there details such as France' earlier use of tanks before the Battle of Cambrai, or of the need for imported Labour Battalions (except in an endnote for after the War) which are of lesser consequence to the War's major characters. Even playing an evening's simulation of the War, whether the venerable World War I by Jim Dunnigan and Joseph Miranda or the more recent The Great War by Al Nofi and John Prados, would offer a better feel for the strategic military aspects of the War. But if the major characters of the War are the target, All the World at War aims true.

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Our Reviewer: Ching Wah Chin, a member of NYMAS, has lectured and written widely on East Asian History. His reviews include The Pacific War and Contingent Victory: Why Japanese Defeat Was Not Inevitable, Nanjing 1937: Battle for a Doomed City, The 1929 Sino-Soviet War, War by Numbers: Understanding Conventional Combat, Future War and the Defence of Europe, Nations in the Balance: The India-Burma Campaign, December 1943-August 1944, and Ring of Fire: A New History of the World at War, 1914.

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Note: All the World at War is also available in e-editions.

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