Reviewed by Michael Peck
The Military Book Review

It is easy to forget that to our grandparents and great-grandparents, the "greatest generation" fought in Flanders and Belleau Wood, not Normandy and Iwo Jima. The First World War was nearly a century ago, but it feels more like a millennium. Trench warfare, "no-man’s-land" and "It’s a Long Way to Tipperary" seem to have more in common with the Crusades and Napoleon than they do with the post-9/11 world.

But the ghosts of 1914 still haunt us. They created the nations of Iraq and Yugoslavia, paving the long, narrow path that led to American troops in Iraq and Kosovo. They brought us the horrors of chemical warfare, ushering in the era of weapons of mass destruction.

Perhaps most important, World War I illustrated the destructiveness and futility of war when advanced, industrialized nations fight. As Cataclysm so insightfully points out, this was a conflict of frustration and escalation. What was supposed to be a glorious war of sweeping maneuver (think shock and awe with horse cavalry) became four years of horrifying attrition as both sides strained every sinew and muscle to compel their opponent to submit.

2004 is not 1914 (whose rival coalitions had more in common with the Cold War than the War on Terror). But in the Age of Jihad, the First World War illustrates the potential for escalation when groups discover that violence isn't achieving their goals. They can compromise and make peace. Or, as happened historically, they can ratchet up the war in the hopes that one more offensive, one more new weapon, will bring victory. And "victory" there was in 1918, at a price so ghastly that it became almost meaningless. Despite sacrificing an entire generation, "the war to end all wars" failed. The seeds of D-Day, Auschwitz and Hiroshima were planted in 1918.

Stevenson's logical, meticulous analysis breaks the conflict down into topics such as economics, technology, politics, and morale. He also examines the often-neglected conflict in Eastern Europe and the Balkans, where the outcomes changed the course of the war as much as the fighting in France and Belgium. What emerges is not the stereotype of stupid generals ordering their soldiers to impale themselves on barbed wire and machine guns, but sophisticated armies struggling to overcome the widening gap between technology and human flesh.

The most interesting part of Cataclysm isn't how the war was won, but how the peace was lost. When the guns fell silent in November 1918, "the Western world was not foredoomed to follow the disastrous trajectory that it pursued in the succeeding decades," Stevenson writes. "Yet the very cost of victory, by undermining political and social stability, had stacked the odds against a peaceful future." A bitter Germany blamed its defeat (as losers often do) on treachery within its ranks. The wartime coalition of the victors disintegrated, as America, Britain, France and Russia — wracked by social and economic disorder and distrustful of one other — failed to respond until it was too late.

The author is neither a pacifist, nor a moral relativist who believes all sides in war are equally guilty. Britain, France and the other Entente powers were not saints, but the author believes they had cause to fight against an arrogant German militarism that ruthlessly invaded a Belgium whose only crime was to stand between the German army and Paris. However, "any decision for war must confront the evidence that it is a fearfully blunt instrument, the repercussions of whose use cannot reliably be predicted and which may make matters even worse," Stevenson concludes.

Cataclysm is not light reading. There are no anecdotes of trench horrors or sentimentality about a bygone era. But Stevenson has the essential gift for the historian-author: the ability to cleanly and methodically lay out his arguments. Cataclysm is a must-read for anyone interested in how the war to end all wars, didn't.