Dance of the Furies and a Shaker of Salt

This past week's selection in my World War I reading seminar was a book called Dance of the Furies: Europe and the Outbreak of World War 1 by Michael Neiberg.  Now, I've got to say that this was actually a pretty interesting read.  Neiberg tells his readers (over and over again, it seems) that the run-of-the-mill citizens of Europe did not want war.  They were a peaceful people (like Americans), and they did not really believe that the assassination of some Austrian archduke would cause such a fuss.  Once things got hot, though, they jumped in with both feet, believing their governmental officials when they were told--all of them--that they were fighting a defensive war.  Yes, even the German and Austrian people were lulled into believing that they were fighting to keep their homelands from being overrun by "the enemy."  And, as soon as the fighting got bad, and it got bad really soon, there was no turning back.  By that point, the soldiers began fighting as much to avenge the lost lives of their comrades as much as to defend their homeland.

Dance of the Furies is quite a departure from the other books on World War I that I've read lately.  First of all, it's focus was not on the machinations of governments and the choices made by a very few men in high places.  Rather, the attention falls on individual people and their reactions and responses to the coming storm of World War I.  In addition, Neiberg tells his readers quite a bit about what the international Socialist groups were doing to prevent the War, efforts that might have worked if things had not gotten out of hand so quickly.  In the end, however, even the Socialists got on the defend-the-homeland bandwagon.

An interesting feature of the War, at least in Britain, was the Defense of the Realm Act (DORA).  While we whine about the Patriot Act here, it was remarkably mild compared with DORA.  The British people could not fly kites, could not feed bread to animals, and could not buy binoculars.  Worst of all, the liquor was watered down!  Can you imagine?  One hundred years later, and I am outraged on behalf of all those long-ago Britons.

With all that I liked this book, there were some pretty serious flaws.  First of all, Neiberg relied almost solely on primary sources, especially memoirs written long after the event.  While it is fine to make use of these materials, he should have warned his readers of the potential troubles with them.  For instance, people's perspectives change over time.  Imagine how a German's perspective of their World War I experience might have changed if they were writing after the end of World War II.  In the end, Neiberg takes all his sources at face value and does not provide his readers with any glimpse into how he analyzed the materials and measured their strengths and weaknesses.

Nor does Neiberg tell his readers about the historiography of the War up to the point at which he was writing.  Millions of words have been written about World War I, yet Neiberg does not provide an analysis of the many theories expressed by all those words.  He does not show how his theories--that people did not want war, that they were seduced by the desire to fight a defensive war, etc.--differ from those of other historians.

So, for all that Neiberg has written an interesting book, readers should take it with a grain of salt.  As long as you keep the shaker nearby and use it liberally, there is a lot of good information and interesting insights to be found between the pages of Dance of the Furies.