The World From Which Wars Sprang

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31077, 4 June 1966, Page 4

The World From Which Wars Sprang

The Proud Tower. By Barban W. Tuchman. Hamish Hamilton. 463 pp. Bibliography and Index.

A work of social history which immediately finds its way on to the “best-seller" lists abroad is something of a rarity. It arouses the suspicion that “history” must have been simplified beyond recognition. But "The Proud Tower” deserves all its wide acclaim and sacrifices little in accuracy or understanding. The author has taken her title from the poem, “A City in the Sea” by Edgar Allen Poe: “While from a proud tower in the town Death looks gigantically down,” and her theme is the quarter-century preceding the 1914-18 war. In recreating, sometimes in meticulous detail, this world of privilege and protest Mrs Tuchman has taken eight great themes of the period, from the emergence of the United States as a naval power to the reform of the House of Lords, and con-

sidered their contributions to the conditions which made the war possible. She has woven them into a striking, even brilliant narrative supported by carefully chosen photographs and an extensive bibliography.

Now, 50 years after the “war to end wars,” scholars have engaged in a series of reappraisals of the outbreak and progress of that most costly struggle. “The Proud Tower,” while part of the

reassessment, is not a war book. It does not mention the war, for, as the author says, in the times she seeks to recapture the war had not yet happened and could not form part of men’s experience. Instead, taking August, 1914 as one of the great terminal crises in history, Mrs Tuchman has reconstructed the quality of the world from which the war sprang, a world vastly different in almost every way from that since 1919. Neither is this a diplomatic or narrowly political account of the origins of the war. Treaties, alliances and crises are only “the fever chart of the patient” writes Mrs Tuchman. “To probe for underlying causes one must operate within the framework of the whole society." “The Proud Tower” does not lay bare all these underlying causes—rather it suggests a host of possible avenues of exploration—but it does succeed in bringing to life a world now forgotten or largely misunderstood. Two great attitudes dominated the period—the sense of optimism that “progress” would continue to create an ever-improving environment for the world’s exploding population, and a growing sense that this was not a Golden Age after all but a time of growing conflict and potential for violence. Once again we see Lord Salisbury, “that strange, powerful, inscrutable, brilliant, obstructive, deadweight at the topC’ determined to resist any further divorce of rank and power in England, while across Europe and the United States a growing band of idealists turned to the “deed

of terror” to promote change in the name of “no government" which Proudhon was the first to give the label of “anarchy.” Little of Mrs Tuchman’s material or her interpretation is new. Her achievement, and it is considerable, is in reducing the dust of past disputes to a readable, lively narrative, liberally sprinkled with superbly drawn biographical sketches, a host of revealing anecdotes, and her remarkable capacity to sift the significant aspects of the times from the mass of detail available. Thus she tells again, in 56 pages, the tragedy of Dreyfus with an objectivity matched by few accounts of that sordid affair. “It was not a deliberate plot to frame’an innocent man. It was the outcome of a reasonable suspicion acted on by dislike, some circumstantial evidence, and instinctive prejudice.” And after a masterly analysis of the affair’s details and implications she concludes: “It was a time of excess. Men plunged in up to the hilt of their capacities and beliefs. On the eve of the new century the affair revealed what energies and ferocity were at hand to greet it”

At the same time, energy and ferocity were also combined in Germany to produce the musical and artistic furore which raged round the work of “Richard the Second.” Richard Strauss, heir to Wagner's mantle and an innovator who created a new form, ridiculed by the critics as “formlessness,” Today Strauss has an honoured place in the concert repertoire. Mrs Tuchman is at her best in emphasising the differences between the time of “The Proud Tower” and the present when she relates the cultural crisis culminating in Strauss’s work, particularly the ballets “Salome” and “Electra.” and the combination of Strauss and Russian ballet in the time of Pavlova and Nijinski.

Yet to have recaptured so brilliantly the flavour of past times is not Mrs Tuchman’s greatest achievement. This is rather her account of a terrifying similarity between the turn of the century and the present—the frustrated search for a means to limit the quality and quantity or armaments. The disarmament conferences of 1899 and 1907 at The Hague are almost forgotten now. “The Proud Tower” demonstrates they are worth a major re-examination in

view of the failures in our own day to limit even more dreadful weapons than dynamite and the Dreadnought. Then, as now, there was room for discussion in the conduct of war, and even some agreement But on the reduction of armaments the talks were as futile as the dreary Geneva discussions today. The Hague meetings were reduced to an Anglo-German contest in which each side tried to force the other to be the one to reject the limitations which neither desired. It was the British (backed only by the United States) who would not renounce the new dumdum bullet But it was the Kaiser who said of international arbitration: “I and my 25 army corps keep the balance of

power in Europe.” The moral was clear. Then, as now, the Great Powers would accept international agreements only so far as they seemed to offer some temporary advantage to national interests. Otherwise agreement was impossible and unenforceable.

This masterpiece of historical reportage closes with a symbolically tragic death—the assassination of the French Socialist leader Jean Jaures on the night the war began. Each reader of “The Proud Tower” may draw what lesson he will sell from it. Mrs Tuchman seldom offers a final judgment but her work should stimulate a wider interest than ever before in a crucial period of modern history.