Pandora's Box: A History of the First World War

By Jörn Leonhard; Trans. by Patrick Camiller

The Belknap Press of Harvard University, 2018
David F. Beer, Reviewer

The Kaiser Visits His Forces in the Field (Early War)

What was the First World War? With the hindsight that we have today, it appears as the formative prelude, elemental crisis, or early turnaround of the still young twentieth century. Soon after its outbreak, people experiencing the war had already begun searching for the right words to describe what was so vast, novel, and even monstrous about it. . . (pp. 2-3)

This almost magisterial volume is a treasure trove for military historians and serious World War One scholars, but at 1087 pages, with a bibliography of some 72 pages, it's not for the beginner or faint-hearted. The author, Jörn Leonhard, is Professor of West European History at the University of Freiburg and brings his wide-ranging knowledge and research to Pandora's Box, thereby giving us a profusion of detail, analysis and interpretation that isn't found in any other single volume that I know of.

The breadth and depth of the book becomes evident even with a cursory leafing through its pages. Its ten chapters are organized into sections and subsections which aren't indicated in the formal table of contents. For example, the 146 pages of Chapter 4, Stasis and Movement, are subdivided thus:

1. Looking for Military Decisions: Battle Zones and Strategies;

2. Violence in War's Shadows: Occupation Regimes and Ethnic Differences;

3: Progressive Tools of War, Violence, and their Political Costs: The Mobilization of Technology in Gas and Submarine Warfare;

4. Wait-and-See Neutrality and Rival Promises: New Players and Their Expansionist Fantasies;

5. Contingency and Stubbornness: The Soldier's Experience of the Front and the Limits of Wartime National Rhetoric;

6. Shirkers, Profiteers, and Traitors: Economic Pressures, Social Conflicts, and Political Volatility on the Home Front;

7. Multiethnic Societies at War: From Undisputed Loyalty to the Escalation of Ethnic Violence;

8. Justifying War, Understanding Violence: Intellectual Responses to the Wartime Experience;

9. Seventeen Months of War: Radicalization and Extension beneath a Surface of Stasis and Movement.

This chapter, like others, contains at least one map, several black and white photos, and concludes with several bulleted points of emphasis. Some photos are particularly moving, such as a young boy in chains under sentence of death in Ukraine and another of Armenian children who have died of starvation.

I can't find many aspects of the Great War that aren't discussed and analyzed in this volume. In the first two chapters, Legacies and Antecedents, the author looks at the prehistory of the war and what it inherited from the nineteenth century. Following are chapters entitled Drift and Escalation: Summer and Fall 1914; Stasis and Movement: 1915; Wearing Down and Holding Out: 1916; Expansion and Erosion, 1917; and Onrush and Collapse: 1918. The last three chapters, Outcome; Memories; and Burdens are all on the manifold consequences of the war the twentieth century experienced and that we still suffer from. Throughout the book we encounter solid historiography of the war and plenty of relevant statistics. A four-page appendix of bar graphs breaks down the losses suffered by British, Empire, French, and German armies for each month of combat, including German losses on the Eastern Front.

On occasion the author employs rhetorical questions to leap into his topics. Hence we have detailed material introduced by "What was the First World War? "But how did the outbreak of war affect families in a position between nations and states [who]could not be assigned to a single nation?" "When and how did the war begin?" "What (regarding the battle of the Somme) then, were the reasons for the catastrophe?" "Why did 1916 represent such a watershed in the war?" "Why did the German army remain capable to the end of inflicting high casualties on the Allies?" "How was the complex legacy of the multiethnic empires addressed after the end of the war?" Each question is answered at length.

Lone Dead German Soldier (Late War)

The following paragraph, from Chapter 6, section 9, and subtitled Demography, Class, and Gender: The Contours of Postwar Societies is fairly indicative of the author's overall style and approach:

In 1917, the long-term structural features that would mark post-war societies were becoming more discernible. This applied first of all at the level of demography: conservative estimates put at roughly 12 percent–one in every eight–the percentage of mobilized soldiers who lost their lives between 1914 and 1918. Another 30 percent were wounded, and 10 percent were interned in POW camps. But such totals mask considerable differences between countries: in France, for example, 77 percent of all soldiers were wounded, killed, or taken captive, while the two million German soldiers who lost their lives represented the highest proportion of all the belligerent countries. Demographically, the heaviest toll was among men aged between 20 and 24: more than 70 percent of soldiers killed came from this age group (p. 685).

Interesting anecdotes and facts frequently appear in this work. Some of the many that were new to me include:

Early in the war about a dozen German soldiers were actually impaled by British lancers.

Unlike in other parts of Africa which held out, the small 3,000-strong defense force in German Southwest Africa had to surrender in May 1915 because the 1904 near extermination of the Herero had left them with few indigenous troops.

The British use of Maori and Indian troops "aroused curiosity but also a subliminal fear, while the deployment of black troops in Allied units provoked German accusations of barbarian warfare."

Overstretched French field surgeons developed "guillotine" amputations to save time.

The German government coined the term "pension psychosis" for those wounded veterans they feared might be trying to get state benefits through pretense.

Partly because the war had "unleashed a succession of ever-rising expectations," President Wilson was seen by some as a kind of Christ-like savior figure when the Paris peace treaties were worked out, but sadly "his policies led to a final surge of contradictory and ultimately incompatible expectations."

As might be expected from his title, Jörn Leonhard begins and ends with the myth of Pandora and her box containing every imaginable form of evil and misery. Only one good thing lay in the bottom of the box: hope. But the box was slammed shut before hope got out, and now "all forms of misery filled the land, sea and air, all manner of fevers laid siege to the earth, and death, which used to creep up slowly on mortals, quickened its step" (p. 2). The children of Thomas Mann (who along with several other literary figures is often quoted) were about to put on a play featuring Pandora's Box when they heard war had broken out. Although they didn't realize it right then, a very real box of horrors had been unleashed on Europe and the world.

Although many may find this book a bit daunting, there's no disputing that it's a powerful and rich record and analysis of the First World War. It can also serve as a valuable reference book since end notes, bibliography and index are so thorough. I rather wish it had come out as Volumes 1 and 2 rather than as one lengthy book, but nevertheless, I'm very pleased to have it within reach on my bookshelf.

David F. Beer