Book Review: The Greatest Day in History

[osprey_archer]

Nicholas Best’s The Greatest Day in History: How, On the Eleventh Hour of the Eleventh Day of the Eleventh Month, The First World War Finally Came to an End is a symphony. Moving chronologically through the last week of the war (a chapter a day, with four full chapters for Armistice Day itself), Best draws on dozens of accounts to create a kaleidoscopic view of the chaotic end of World War I on all sides.

The kaiser’s staff contemplating a glorious last charge, so the kaiser could be shot gloriously in battle rather than abdicating. Woodrow Wilson watching the election results that hand the Senate to the opposition. Englishwoman Flora Sandes, who served as a sergeant in the Serbian army (you can bet I’m going to read her memoir), separated from her regiment by a bout of the flu and now running a backwater hospital. An English-born aristocrat married to a German, hiding out from the revolution convulsing the streets of Berlin. Soldiers from England, America, Canada, Scotland, Australia, reacting to the end of the war with delirious joy, numb acceptance, fury at the insensitivity of joy after so much sorrow; and sorrow that the excitement of war will all be over tomorrow.

The quiet of the countryside, after years of shelling so loud that it could be heard across the English Channel. Now the shelling is over, and the day is so quiet that you can hear the leaves rustle.

This style of close-up, chronological order history can give such a good feeling of what it was like to be there for an event: the little things that stick out, the strangeness of hearing the rustling leaves, the cities lit up after years of blackouts. And it also highlights the contingency of history, the swiftness with which things change: the kaiser’s glorious last charge that never happened. The German politician, swept away by the enthusiasm of the revolutionary crowd, who announced the kaiser’s abdication before it happened, thus forcing the kaiser’s hand.

I particularly appreciated the wealth of information about the German side of things, as I’ve struggled to find books about the German experience of World War I. (Oddly, there seem to be plenty of books about the German experience of World War II.)

It’s striking just how many people, even on Armistice Day, saw the seeds for more war in the terms of the peace: either the harshness of those terms, or the fact that they had been imposed without a clear Allied military victory. Perhaps if the Allies had marched down Unter der Linden in Berlin, they could have gotten away with the harshness. But the combination of harshness without undeniable military victory was fatal.

A lagniappe: a piece of poetry George S. Patton wrote on Armistice Day, when he was stuck behind the lines recovering from a wound in his side.

We can but hope that ere we drown
‘Neath treacle floods of grace,
The tuneless horns of mighty Mars
Once more shall rouse the Race.
When such times come, Oh! God of War
Grant that we pass midst strife,
Knowing once more the whitehot joy
Of taking human life.

Comments

[sovay]

This style of close-up, chronological order history can give such a good feeling of what it was like to be there for an event: the little things that stick out, the strangeness of hearing the rustling leaves, the cities lit up after years of blackouts.


It sounds great. If it doesn't include Mary Wedderburn Canaan, however, I recommend her.

[osprey_archer]

Unfortunately my library doesn't have her book, but perhaps I'll run across it sometime.

[philomytha]

Oh no, another book for my TBR pile :-D

I know what you mean about it being harder to find books about the German side of WW1. Meeting the Enemy by Richard van Emden had a moderate amount - it's about encounters outside of combat between British and Germans during the war, so civilians, immigrants, POWs and so forth, and a lot of German perspective as well as the British.

[osprey_archer]

The endlessly growing TBR pile! Truly a problem.

I found this book just by trawling the stacks at the library, which might be the way to go in finding more books with at least some information about the German experience of World War I. There have to be some other books that have that as a partial focus, even if not enough of a focus to show up in the online library catalog.

[skygiants]

This one sounds truly fascinating, thank you for writing it up!

[osprey_archer]

It is fascinating! The author wrote a similar book about the last days of World War II which I also intend to read.

[edwardianspinsteraunt]

Oh wow, this sounds so interesting! I love it when history is examined through that sort of kaleidescopic lens, with lots of detail about individual lives and experiences. And that's definitely a good point about the shortage of German WWI memoirs. The only one I've heard of, other than All Quiet on the Western Front, is Ernst Junger's Storm of Steel-- I don't know if you're familiar with that one?

[osprey_archer]

I'll have to see if I can track it down.

[lucymonster]

Oh, this sounds magnificent! Making a mental note of it for when I finally get my attention span back.

[osprey_archer]

It's a fascinating read! Really interesting to get such a granular view of some of the decisions made - and some of the decisions no one made, that more or less got forced on people by the popular mood.

[asakiyume]

Among other things, your post make me think about how all that remains for me from learning about World War I are random, insufficient things: the dates, the fact of its horror and that it prompted the (ineffectual) League of Nations, that it carried the seeds and fertilizer for WWII, that it was trenches and shell shock, that there were famous young poets who died in it, "I am the grass." But what doesn't remain for me is any sense of motivations or strategy or battles** or how the war ended or really what it *was*, beyond a horrible war-of-attrition situation where periodically one side or the other would charge the other. And yet it will have been on either your pages or Sovay's that I learned that trench warfare didn't even start into some years in (or am I hallucinating?)

Fortunately I have Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Encyclopedia (an abridgment of Encyclopedia Britannia, MW's parent company), which I helped create like a year before Google made it obsolete. I can go read up on it and at least (re)fill the gaps in my knowledge. Some of them. But your entry shows me how much of that I need to recover before I could even situate the book you just read.

**I mean I have names, like Somme and Amiens, but no sense of what happened there.

[osprey_archer]

The trench warfare started within a few months of the beginning of World War I. You might be remembering a post about the Civil War, where something resembling trench warfare developed on the eastern front during the final year of the war?

[asakiyume]

Yeah, I've lost it now. I do think it had to do with World War I, but maybe it wasn't with the establishment of trench warfare; maybe it was with equipping the trenches for the long term or something. But possibly you're right and I'm remembering a post about the Civil War!

[osprey_archer]

It might have been something about equipping the trenches for the long term, which the Allies resisted doing for a long time because they wanted so badly to believe that the war would become mobile again.