Stabbing Their Own Backs

Big, proud, well armed, well trained and drilled, haughty but honourable, the German army in its day was the most fearsome fighting machine on earth. But in the world crisis that began in 1914, its top brass wrecked its own world.

That is the message from this extraordinary history of the First World War, published in German in 2014 for the centenary of the start of the war and now available in a brilliant translation. The author, a youngish professor of European history at Freiberg University, writes calmly and impartially across a vast canvas stretching from Ireland to Korea and Australia and New Zealand, but over a thousand pages the wrecking ball destroying millions of lives was usually the German military leadership or its ally in Austria-Hungary.

It started the war with the misguided invasion of Germany’s neighbours, France, Belgium and Russia. Then, with aggressive territorial claims such as permanent control of Belgium, it thwarted peace moves to end pointless…