The Horrific First Months of the Great War

Alexandra Churchill and Nicolai Eberholst‘s Ring of Fire is about the opening salvos of the First World War in 1914. Quickly into Ring, one soon realizes the Lincolnesque sentiment from a 1960s Star Trek television episode that “There is nothing good in war. Except its ending.” In fact, from the very first chapter of Ring, one can immediately note how humans globally share similar sentiments throughout history. Even an Eight Century Chinese poem* would be easily recognizable by Churchill and Eberholst when they describe soldiers in 1914 heading to the front, some with weeping relatives waving farewell.

Ring provides not a glorious account of military courage and generalship, but a continuous, horrific narrative of spent lives and treasure through quotations from more plebian sources. While Ring covers the war in broad strokes with sufficient background of major events and issues, the focus is the view from trenches and civilian kitchens, not Staff or Cabinet meetings. Ring is not meant to be a detailed account of maneuvers and strategy, although there is enough provided for context. Instead, descriptions of mutilated dead and soon to be dying are staples of each described battle and campaign, other than largely highlighting the excessive incompetence of the initial commanders of all sides. The ground level horrors of industrialized war, of war in general, is laid out using quotations from privates and commoners, with page volume space fully competitive to Ring’s portion of its higher-level account of 1914 events. Churchill and Eberholst specifically set out to narrate the war through the eyes of everyday people, and they have succeeded.

Ring covers 1914 in rough chronological order, describing the flawed plans and the debacles on both Central and Allied sides, and touches on the plight of the neutrals and perfidious international relations. Ring also examines the war’s global effect of involving far-flung empires, especially of their non-white subjects, which is usually an understated topic in other more euro-centric First World War narratives. Relatively minor campaigns in China and the Pacific are considered, although consistent with the 1914 focus of the book there is limited expansion to any long-term consequences. Major events such as Germany’s failed Schlieffen Plan, Russia’s Tannenberg disaster, Austria-Hungary’s Galicia debacle, and France’s “Miracle on the Marne” are reported dutifully. Naval warfare, before convoys, is covered on several seas, as well as the economic implications of blockade and strategic resources. Submarines and water mines receive note because of their technically necessary disregard of the then accepted rules of naval warfare. However, all events are punctuated with quotations from common folk.

Ring does offer some valuable tidbits, such as the needless destruction of Parisian homes and trees to clear fields of fire for defending Paris, when the Germans never reached Paris, and pointless destruction such as razing the village of Boncelles to defend Liège, when Liège’s forts were never properly designed or commanded against modern assault. However, Ring’s focus on 1914, and especially the work's localized view of commoner participants, does lack a context for such command decisions. Those sacrifices pale in comparison to scorched earth practices during the Second World War such as China’s often criticized 1938 destruction of its Yellow River levees, but the greater context of existential emergency, real (in China’s case), anticipated but never realized (in France’s case), or futile (in Belgium’s case) might have been given more detail for the reader’s appreciation, other than just emphasizing Ring’s recurring theme of wars’ destructiveness.

The work also explains how the lessons from earlier industrial wars provided those combatants who learned critical advantages over a simple offensive spirit mentality anchored from old codes of honour and manliness. The American Civil War’s use of trenches, the Russo-Japanese War’s use of machine guns; and advances such as repeating rifles and quick-firing artillery made frontal assaults suicidal. The consumption of manpower and ammunition, both artillery and small arms, was far past initial estimates and underlined the industrial and deadly attritional nature of the conflict.

Ring is a relatively short but crucial reminder that war is never to be trifled with. Rabid nationalism and glory-hunting can cause evils far exceeding the mundane brutality of simple death and destruction. Marching towards conflict without a full sense of objectives and costs is a recipe for pointless human misery, especially in the industrialized mechanized attritional warfare from the mid-19th century on. Ring rightly compares a view of the dawn of such warfare in the American Civil War’s fighting at Chancellorsville, and needs not mention the equivalent horrors of the latter 20th Century, or even the wars of the 21st. Descriptions of torn bodies, lost minds and utter desolation should be far too familiar for any military historian, from nearly every century. While Ring is not meant to be a definitive work on the First World War, it should be a well received warning against the inevitable futility of war conducted with ignorance and led by unconscious or unconscientious motives, the brunt of which would always be borne by line grunts and innocent civilians.

“ The war-chariots rattle,                                                                                                                                      The war-horses whinny.                                                                                                                                  Each man of you has a bow and a quiver at his belt.                                                                                    Father, mother, son, wife, stare at you going,                                                                                                          Till dust shall have buried the bridge beyond Changan.                                                                                          They run with you, crying, they tug at your sleeves,                                                                                          And the sound of their sorrow goes up to the clouds;                                                                                      And every time a bystander asks you a question,                                                                                            You can only say to him that you have to go.”

Translation by Harold Witter Bynner, which by no fault of the translator/poet, does not do justice to the rhyming and cadence of the poem in Cantonese.

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Note: Ring of Fire is also available in e-editions.

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