Robert K. Massie, author of the 1994 foreword to the book, attributes its “enormous reputation” to four qualities: “a wealth of vivid detail which keeps the reader immersed in events almost as an eyewitness; a prose style which is transparently clear, intelligent, controlled and witty; a cool detachment of moral judgement - Mrs. Tuchman is never preachy or reproachful: she draws on skepticism, not cynicism, leaving the reader not so much outraged by human villainy as amused and saddened by human folly. These first three qualities are present in all of Barbara Tuchman’s work, but in the The Guns of August, there is a fourth, which makes the book, once taken up, almost impossible to set aside. Remarkably, she persuades the reader to suspend any foreknowledge of what is about to happen[;] so great is Mrs. Tuchman’s skill that the reader forgets what he knows. [...] Mrs. Tuchman’s triumph is that she makes the events of August 1914 as suspenseful on the page as they were to the people living through them."[8]
Tuchman knows to find and express "the vivid specific fact which would imprint on the reader's mind the essential nature of the man or event."[9] Some examples follow.
Key players
Tuchman references almost four hundred actors in The Guns of August, General Joffre being cited the most on 125 different pages. Thirty of them receive a development of their characteristics or background.[Notes 3]
The four excerpts below illustrate Robert K. Massie’s remark that Tuchman can “imprint the essential natural of the man”:[9]
- Joseph Joffre was “massive and paunchy in his baggy uniform, with a fleshy face adorned by a heavy, nearly white mustache and bushy eyebrows to match with a clear youthful skin, clam blue eyes and a candid, tranquil gaze, Joffre looked like Santa Claus and gave an impression of benevolence and naïveté - two qualities not noticeably part of his character.”[10] “Joffre’s supreme confidence in himself was expressed [in 1912] when his aide, Major Alexandre, asked him if he thought war was shortly to be expected. “Certainly I think so,” Joffre replied. “I have always thought so. It will come. I shall fight and I shall win. I have always succeeded in what I do - as in the Sudan. It will be that way again.” “It will mean a Marshal’s baton for you,” his aide suggested with some awe at the vision. “Yes.” Joffre acknowledged the prospect with laconic equanimity.”[11]
- “The short, stocky and florid Sir John French, about to take command in the field, was keyed to a pitch of valour and combativeness. His normally apoplectic expression, combined with the tight cavalryman's stock which he affected in place of collar and tie, gave him an appearance of being perpetually on the verge of choking, as indeed he often was emotionally if not physically.”[12]
- Vladimir Sukhomlinov was "artful, indolent, pleasure-loving, chubby [...] with an almost feline manner, who, smitten by the twenty-three year old wife of a provincial governor, contrived to get rid of the husband by divorce on framed evidence and marry the beautiful residue as his fourth wife.“[13]
- "Tall, heavy, bald and sixty-six years old, Moltke habitually wore an expression of profound distress, which led the Kaiser to call him der traurige Julius (for what might be rendered "Gloomy Gus"; in fact, his name was Helmuth). Poor health, for which he took an annual cure at Karlsbad, and the shadow of a great uncle were perhaps cause for gloom."[14]
Aside these four men, Tuchman characterises or gives the background of twenty-seven actors:
- France: Joseph Gallieni, Louis Franchet d'Espèrey, Augustin Dubail, Adolphe Messimy, Raymond Poincaré, Noël de Castelnau, Michel-Joseph Maunoury and de Fernand de Langle de Cary;
- Germany: Eric Ludendorff, Alfred von Schlieffen (“of the two classes of Prussian officer, the bullnecked and the wasp-waisted, he belonged to the second”[15]), Max Hoffmann, Friedrich von Bernhardi, Alexander von Kluck, Crown Prince Rupprecht, Crown Prince Wilhelm, Paul von Hindenburg, Maximilian von Prittwitz and Hermann von François;
- Britain: Jackie Fisher, Sir Edward Grey, Sir Henry Wilson and Ernest Troubridge;
- Russia: Grand Duke Nicholas, Nicholas II and Alexander Samsonov;
- Belgium: King Albert.
It is worth noting those actors Tuchman cites often but does not characterise, if only with a few well chosen words:
- France: Ferdinand Foch, Charles Lanrezac
- Germany: Kaiser Wilhelm II (“possessor of the least inhibited tongue in Europe”[16]), Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg, Max von Hausen, Karl von Bülow, Wilhelm Souchon
- Britain: Winston Churchill, Kitchener, H. H. Asquith, Richard Haldane, Archibald Murray.
Key events
The introductory paragraph of A funeral, the first chapter of The Guns of August, took Barbara Tuchman "eight hours to complete and became the most famous passage in all her work".[17] The Canadian historian Margaret MacMillan “was gripped from her wonderful first sentence":[18]
So gorgeous was the spectacle on the May morning of 1910 when nine kings rode in the funeral of Edward VII of England that the crowd, waiting in hushed and black-clad awe, could not keep back gasps of admiration.
— Barbara W. Tuchman
One of the key events took place on August 1. "In Berlin just after five o'clock a telephone rang in the Foreign Office. [...] "Moltke wants to know whether things can start." At that moment, [...] a telegram, from Prince Lichnowsky, ambassador in London, reported an English offer, as Lichnowsky understood it, "that in case we did not attack France, England would remain neutral and would guarantee France's neutrality." [...] The Kaiser clutched at Lichnowsky's passport to a one-front war. Minutes counted. Already mobilization was rolling inexorably toward the French frontier. The first hostile act [...] was scheduled within an hour. It must be stopped, stopped at once. But how? Where was Moltke? Moltke had left the palace. An aide was sent off with siren screaming, to intercept him. He was brought back. The Kaiser was himself again, the All-Highest, the War Lord, blazing with a new idea, planning, proposing, disposing. He read Moltke the telegram and said in a triumph: "Now we can go to war against Russia only. We simply march the whole of our Army to the East!" Aghast at the thought of his marvelous machinery of mobilization wrenched into reverse, Moltke refused point-blank. For the past ten years, first as assistant to Schlieffen, then as his successor, Moltke's job had been planning for this day. The Day, Der Tag, for which all Germany's energies were gathered, on which the march to final mastery of Europe would begin. It weighed upon him with an oppressive, almost unbearable responsibility. [...] "Your Majesty," Moltke told him now, "it cannot be done. The deployment of millions cannot be improvised. [...] Those arrangements took a whole year of intricate labor to complete" - and Moltke closed upon that rigid phrase, the basis for every major German mistake, the phrase that launched the invasion of Belgium and the submarine war against the United States, the inevitable phrase when military plans dictate policy - "and once settled it cannot be altered."[19]
