War and Responsibilty: Ferguson's PITY OF WAR (book review)
so long for the Allies to achieve victory, Ferguson asks why and how the Central Powers lasted so long in a war in which they were clearly outnumbered financially and economically. If the British blockade, for example, were indeed the reason for eventual German defeat--as fellow historian Jay Winter argues in his The Great War and the British People (1986), among other books--why didn't the war end during the winter of 1916-17, the worst time of the blockade? It didn't, because Ferguson argues, the German economy was as efficient if not substantially more so, than the British one. [10]
Likewise, the soldiers of the Central Powers were immensely more efficient at killing Allied soldiers than ALlied ones were. It only took a German or Austrian soldier $11,344.77 to kill an British, French, Italian, or Russian soldier, a figure less than a third of what it cost for the Allied soldiers to kill a Central Power soldier: $36,485.48. [11] Ferguson speculates that had the Germans not had to have kept nearly a million soldiers in Russia to enforce [the Treaty of] Brest Litovsk [1918], it is highly plausible they would have won the war in the spring of 1918.
Finally, Ferguson focuses on the soldiers themselves. In Chapter 12 he argues, quite perversely, that soldiers continued on, not only because of military discipline, but rather because they wanted to keep on killing. [12] They avoided surrendering because the Geneva Convention was not enforced by either side, and thus, one stood a greater chance surviving by continuing on. The fact that it was not deemed safe to surrender led to the prolonging of the war. [13] Finally in Chapter 14, Ferguson revisits the reparations issue, arguing that it wasn't German refusal to not pay, but rather Allied inability to collect that undermined Versailles. [14]
In conclusion, Ferguson demonstrates again his personal motives, as well as his political reasons [he is a Tory who is upset at the obliteration of the British Empire and of British economic power throughout the 20th century], for writing this book.
- Had Britain stood aside--even for a matter of weeks--continental Europe could therefore have been transformed into something not wholly unlike the European Union we know today--but without the massive contraction in British overseas power entailed by the fighting of two world wars... there plainly would not have been that great incursion of American financial and military power into European affairs which effectively marked
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