The Guns of August (2 page)

The problem with research, of course, was knowing when to stop. “One must stop before one has finished,” she advised, “otherwise, one will never stop and never finish.” “Research,” she explained, “is endlessly seductive, but writing is hard work.” Eventually, however, she began to select, to distill, to give the facts coherence, to create patterns, to construct narrative form; in short, to write. The writing process, she said, was “laborious, slow, often painful, sometimes agony. It requires rearrangement, revision, adding, cutting, rewriting. But it brings a sense of excitement, almost of rapture, a moment on Olympus.” Surprisingly, it took years for her to develop her famous style. Her thesis at Radcliffe came back with a note: “Style undistinguished.” Her first book
Bible and Sword
collected thirty rejection slips before it found a publisher. She persisted and ultimately arrived at a formula that worked : “hard work, a good ear, and continued practice.”

Mrs. Tuchman believed most of all in the power of “that magnificent instrument that lies at the command of all of us—the English language.” Indeed, her allegiance often was split between her subject and the instrument for expressing it. “I am a writer first whose subject is history,” she said, and, “The art of writing interests me as much as the art of history … I am seduced by the sound of words and by the interaction of their sounds and sense.” Sometimes, when she believed that she had arrived at a particularly felicitous phrase or sentence or paragraph, she wanted to share it immediately and telephoned her editor to read it to him. Precisely
controlled, elegant language, she felt, was the instrument to give voice to history. Her ultimate objective was “to make the reader turn the page.”

In a time of mass-culture egalitarianism and mediocrity, she was an elitist. For her, the two essential criteria of quality were “intensive effort and honesty of purpose. The difference is not only a matter of artistic skill, but of intent. You do it well or you do it half well,” she said.

Her relations with academics, critics, and reviewers were wary. She did not have a Ph.D. “It’s what saved me, I think,” she said, believing that the requirements of conventional academic life can stultify imagination, stifle enthusiasm and deaden prose style. “The academic historian,” she said, “suffers from having a captive audience, first in the supervisor of his dissertation, then in the lecture hall. Keeping the reader turning the page has not been his primary concern.” Someone suggested that she might enjoy teaching. “Why should I teach?,” she responded vigorously. “I am a writer! I don’t want to teach! I couldn’t teach if I tried!” For her, a writer’s place was in the library or the field doing research, or at the desk, writing. Herodotus, Thucydides, Gibbon, MacCauley, and Parkman, she noted, did not have Ph.D.s.

Mrs. Tuchman was stung when reviewers, especially academic reviewers, sniffed that her work was “popular history,” implying that because it sold a great many copies, it failed to meet their own exacting standards. She routinely ignored the policy most writers observe of never responding to negative reviews, because to do so simply provokes the reviewer and opens further avenues of harm. She fired right back. “I have noticed,” she wrote to
The New York Times,
“that reviewers who are in a great hurry to complain of an author’s failure to include this or that have usually themselves failed to read the text under review.” And again: “Nonfiction authors understand that reviewers must find some error to expose in order to show their own erudition and we wait especially to know what it will be.” Eventually, most academics were won over—or, at least, backed away from confrontation. Over the years, she gave addresses at, and collected degrees from, many of
the greatest universities in the land, won two Pulitzer Prizes, and became the first woman elected president of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters in its eighty-year existence.

For all the combativeness of her professional personality, there was a rare tolerance in Barbara Tuchman’s writing. The vain, the pompous, the greedy, the foolish, the cowardly—all were described in human terms and, where possible, given the benefit of the doubt. A good example of this is her analysis of why Sir John French, the previously fiery commander of the British Expeditionary Force in France, seemed unwilling to send his troops into battle: “Whether the cause was [Minister of War, Lord] Kitchener’s instructions with their emphasis on keeping the army in being and their caution against ‘losses and wastage,’ or whether it was a sudden realization percolating into Sir John French’s consciousness that behind the BEF was no national body of trained reserves to take its place, or whether on reaching the Continent within a few miles of a formidable enemy and certain battle the weight of responsibility oppressed him, or whether all along beneath his bold words and manner the natural juices of courage had been invisibly drying up … no one who has not been in the same position can judge.”

Barbara Tuchman wrote history to tell the story of human struggle, achievement, frustration, and defeat, not to draw moral conclusions. Nevertheless,
The Guns of August
offers lessons. Foolish monarchs, diplomats, and generals blundered into a war nobody wanted, an Armageddon which evolved with the same grim irreversability as a Greek tragedy. “In the month of August, 1914,” she wrote, “there was something looming, inescapable, universal that involved us all. Something in that awful gulf between perfect plans and fallible men that makes one tremble with a sense of ‘There but for the Grace of God go we.’” Her hope was that people reading her book might take warning, avoid these mistakes, and do a little better. It was this effort and these lessons which attracted presidents and prime ministers as well as millions of ordinary readers.

Family and work dominated Barbara Tuchman’s life. What gave her the most pleasure was to sit at a table, writing. She permitted no distractions. Once, after she was famous, her daughter Alma told her that Jane Fonda and Barbra Streisand wanted her to write a movie script. She shook her head. “But, Ma,” said Alma, “don’t you even want to meet Jane Fonda?” “Oh, no,” said Mrs. Tuchman. “I don’t have time. I’m working.” She wrote her first drafts in longhand on a yellow legal pad with “everything messed up and x’d out and inserted.” She followed with drafts on the typewriter, triple-spaced, ready to be scissored apart and Scotch-taped back together in a different sequence. Customarily, she worked for four or five hours at a stretch, without interruption. “The summer she was finishing
The Guns of August,
” her daughter Jessica remembers, “she was behind schedule and desperate to catch up … To get away from the telephone she set up a card table and a chair in an old dairy attached to the stables—a room that was cold even in summer. She would go to work at 7:30
A.M.
My job was to bring her lunch on a tray at 12:30
P.M.
—a sandwich, V-8 juice, a piece of fruit. Every day, approaching silently on the pine needles that surrounded the stables, I’d find her in the same position, always engrossed. At 5
P.M.
or so she stopped.”

One of the paragraphs Barbara Tuchman wrote that summer took her eight hours to complete and became the most famous passage in all her work. It is the opening paragraph of
The Guns of August
which begins “So gorgeous was the spectacle on the May morning of 1910 …” By turning the page, the fortunate person who has not yet encountered this book can begin to read.

—Robert K. Massie

T
HE GENESIS OF THIS BOOK
lies in two earlier books I wrote, of which the First World War was the focal point of both. The first was
Bible and Sword,
about the origins of the Balfour Declaration issued in 1917 in anticipation of the British entry into Jerusalem in the course of the war against Turkey in the Middle East. As the center and source of the Judaeo-Christian religion, and incidentally of the Moslem as well, although that was a matter of lesser concern at the time, the taking of the sacred city was felt to be an awesome moment requiring some major gesture to accompany it and provide a fitting moral foundation. An official statement recognizing Palestine as the national homeland of the original inhabitants was conceived to fulfill the need, not in consequence of any philo-Semitism but in consequence rather of two other factors: the influence in British culture of the Bible, especially the Old Testament, and a twin influence in that year of what the
Manchester Guardian
called “the insistent logic of the military situation on the banks of the Suez Canal,” in short,
Bible and Sword.

The second of the two books preceding
The Guns
was
The Zimmermann Telegram,
a proposal by the then German foreign minister, Arthur Zimmermann, to induce Mexico together with Japan to make war as an ally of Germany on the United States with the promise of regaining her lost territories of Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas. Zimmermann’s
clever idea was to keep the United States busy on her own continent so as to prevent her entering the war in Europe. However, it accomplished the reverse, when in the form of a wireless telegram to the president of Mexico, it was decoded by the British and made available to and published by the American government. Zimmermann’s proposal aroused the anger of the public and helped to precipitate the United States into the war.

I had always thought in my acquaintance with history up to that point, that 1914 was the hour when the clock struck, so to speak, the date that ended the nineteenth century and began our own age, “the Terrible Twentieth” as Churchill called it. In seeking the subject for a book, I felt that 1914 was it. But I did not know what should be the gateway or the framework. Just at the moment when I was floundering in search of the right approach, a small miracle dropped in my lap when my agent called to ask, “Would you like to talk to a publisher who wants you to do a book on 1914?” I was struck, as the phrase goes, all of a heap, but not to the extent that I couldn’t say, “Well, yes I would,” even if rather perturbed that someone else had my idea, although happy he had it with regard to the right person.

He was a Britisher, Cecil Scott of the Macmillan Company, now regretfully deceased, and what he wanted as he told me later when we met, was a book about what really happened at the Battle of Mons, the first encounter overseas of the BEF (the British Expeditionary Force) in 1914, which had been such an extraordinary survival and check to the Germans that legends grew of supernatural intervention. I was going skiing that week after the meeting with Mr. Scott and took along a suitcase of books to Vermont.

I came home with the proposal to do a book on the escape of the
Goeben,
the German battleship, which, by eluding a pursuit by British cruisers in the Mediterranean, had reached Constantinople and brought Turkey and with it the whole Ottoman Empire of the Middle East into the war, determining the course of the history of that area from that day to this. The
Goeben
seemed a natural for me for it had become family history which we had witnessed, including myself at the age of two. That happened when we, too, were crossing the Mediterranean en route to Constantinople to visit my grandfather, who was then American ambassador to the Porte. It was an often-told story in the family circle how the puffs of gunsmoke from the pursuing British cruisers were seen from our ship, and how the
Goeben
put on speed and got away, and how on arriving at Constantinople we were the first to bring news to officials and diplomats of the capital of the drama at sea that we had seen. My mother’s account of her heavy questioning by the German ambassador before she could even debark or had a chance to greet her father was my first impression, almost at firsthand, of the German manner.

Almost thirty years later when I returned from my skiing week in Vermont and told Mr. Scott that this was the story of 1914 that I wanted to write, he said No, that was not what he wanted. He was still fixed on Mons. How had the BEF thrown back the Germans? Had they really seen the vision of an angel over the battlefield? And what was the basis of the legend of the Angel of Mons, afterward so important on the Western Front? Frankly, I was still more interested in the
Goeben
than in the Angel of Mons, but the fact of a publisher ready for a book on 1914 was more important than either.

The war as a whole seemed too large and beyond my capacity. But Mr. Scott kept telling me I could do it, and when I formed the plan of keeping to the war’s first month, which contained all the roots, including the
Goeben and
the Battle of Mons, to make us both happy, the project began to seem feasible.

When mired among all those Roman-numeraled corps and left and right flanks, I soon felt out of my depth and felt I should have gone to Staff and Command School for ten years before undertaking a book of this kind, especially when trying to tell how the French on the defensive managed to regain Alsace at the very beginning, which I never did understand but I managed to weave my way in and around it, a maneuver
one learns in the process of writing history—to muffle the facts a bit when one can’t understand everything—watch Gibbon do it in those sonorous balanced sentences which, if you analyze them, often turn out to make little sense, but you forget that in the marvel of their structure. I am no Gibbon, but I have learned the value of venturing into the unfamiliar instead of returning to a field of previous study where one already knows the source material and all the persons and circumstances. To do the latter makes the work certainly easier, but removes any sense of discovery and surprise, which is why I like moving to a new subject for a new book. Though it may distress the critics, it pleases me. Since I was hardly known to the critics when
The Guns
was published, with no reputation for them to enjoy smashing, the book received instead the warmest reception. Clifton Fadiman wrote in the Book-of-the-Month Club bulletin: “One must be careful with the big words. Still, there is a fair chance that
The Guns of August
may turn out to be a historical classic. Its virtues are almost Thucydidean: intelligence, concision, weight detachment. Dealing with the days preceding and following the outbreak of the First World War, its subject like that of Thucydides goes beyond the limited scope and reach of the mere narrative. For in hard, sculptured prose this book fixes the moments that have led inexorably to our own time. It places our dread day in long perspective, arguing that if most of the world’s men, women and children are soon to be burned to atoms, the annihilation would seem to proceed directly out of the mouths of the guns that spoke in August 1914. This may be an oversimplification but it describes the author’s thesis which she presents with deadly quiet. It is her conviction that the deadlock of the terrible month of August determined the future course of the war and the terms of the peace, the shape of the inter-war period and the conditions of the Second Round.”