“The Wolf”, Richard Guilliatt and Peter Hohnen

A very brief one this time - as I'm currently doing a full review of this for Intelligence and National Security, but given the extent to which this is currently being pushed in the UK's airports some initial thoughts might be of interest.

Telling the story of the German warship Wolf's long raiding cruise between late 1916 and early 1918 "The Wolf" is unashamedly populist and while this makes it possible to question it academically the publishers almost certainly took the decision to make this a deliberately accessible book, and on a summer afternoon with competition for attention this is no bad thing.

The actions of the Wolf in the later part of the First World War were to all intents and purposes inconsequential to the ultimate outcome of the war, but this does not alter the fascinating human story of the ship, its crew, and its victims, as well as the wider impact of World War I on Australasia in the later part of the conflict told by Guilliat and Hohnen. It's also a lovely opportunity to go into a little known aspect of Great War naval history - while the Emden and the rest of Graf Spee's raiders have had their time in the sun, the later raiders are largely forgotten. It's easy to be sceptical about airport history, but in this case the result is really rather pleasing.

“Riding the Retreat: Mons to Marne 1914 Revisited”, Richard Holmes

The flat countryside of northern France and Belgium is eerie when viewed with a historical eye. Today the train from London to Brussels hurtles through an emotive landscape, punctuated by periodic glimpses of pill boxes and cemeteries, grim reminders of 20th century European history. A short train ride south from Brussels brings you to the town of Mons, capital of Hainault, and site of the British Army's first engagement of the First World War. With "Riding the Retreat" Richard Holmes, perhaps best known for his magnificent “War Walks” series, incomprehensibly unavailable on DVD, combines a readable history of the opening part of the Great War with a personal and likeable travelogue recreating the headlong retreat on horseback.

 

When one thinks of the 1914-18 war one cannot help conjure up a picture of cloying mud, trenches, and endless static fighting for gains measured more in yards than miles. This masks the period in August 1914 when the long 19th century ended, when there was truly a war of movement and cavalry was not quite yet the tragic anachronism it would become in a matter of months. It is this war of movement that has largely preserved the Mons area and the countryside over which the British retreated, and this means that to this day the visitor can still see the landscape much as it would have been nearly 100 years ago. Holmes skillfully applies the story of the soldiers of 1914 to what is visible today, and as such brings it to life in a moving, emotional way. Having been privileged to live in Mons in 2007 I found this especially easy to relate to.  Then my apartment, not far from the Berlin Gate to NATO's present day Supreme Headquarters, was just beside the point, in the little village of Casteau, where the first meeting took place, and every Friday I would drive to Soignies, in whose narrow streets the breakneck cavalry running battle ended

 

Holmes makes the point that August 1914 was one of only two periods when the war could have been comprehensively lost militarily, and this is spectacularly illustrated in “Riding the Retreat”, where the headlong pace of the retreat, is shown by pointing out how units dispersed in Belgium, only managed to reform in western cities such as Le Mans. The point too, that the British were not forced due east, but in a much more southerly direction after Mons is driven home, which highlights the gaping hole the Germans blew in the allied lines, and what made the prospect of success for the Schlieffen Plan much more than a nebulous idea. The speed of the German advance, the disorganised chaos into which the allies were thrown, and the perpetual motion of the retreating British Expeditionary Force describe a very different war from that which we associate with the 1914-18 period.

Affecting and compelling as the history is, this book's real strength is in the travelogue of Holmes and his companions, human and equine, as they make their way through Belgium and France. This aspect of the book is a very human story, with engaging and entertaining characters. Holmes describes the sort of interesting misadventures, lovely people, and fantastic meals that make this a journey one wants to have been part of, and one which it is a pleasure to read about. As such this book, really about a monumental human tragedy, as few of those fighting in August 1914 survived unscathed to November 1918, is one that makes you smile, which is in itself a sort of tribute to the sacrifice made by soldiers and civilians on both sides.

“Paradise Lost: Smyrna 1922: The Destruction of Islam's City of Tolerance”, Giles Milton

September 11 is now, for all of us, a tremendously emotive date, so much so that it is surprising when one comes across seismic historic events that did not take place in New York and Washington in 2001 it brings one up short. September 11 1922 is one such date.

I've been reading and thinking about the birth of modern Turkey, to one extent or another, for 20 years or so, and it's a credit to the power of this book that it captured my attention and served very well to keep my attention through a day in a Budapest airport riven by crowds, strikes, and the aftermath of altogether too much hospitality the night before.

Giles Milton's telling of the fall of Smyrna intermingles the broad sweep of the long First World War with individual tales, first of opulence, then of heart rending atrocity. Smyrna is portrayed as a bucolic pleasure garden destroyed in an orgy of vandalism by a victorious Turkish army, and as such this should read as a classic tale of 'good and evil'. Interestingly however, Milton cannot achieve such a simplistic conclusion, and ultimately this is the real strength of the work.

There are villains in the piece, but none of them were directly responsible for setting fire to Smyrna in September 1922; indeed at no stage is an attempt made to seriously posit that the fire that engulfed the city was a consciously taken political decision. Instead the reader finds complicity further afield. Smyrna ultimately was not destroyed by Turks, it had, after all, flourished under Ottoman rule and the decentralised Ottoman system of government allowed it to function freely through the First War. Instead the megali idea of Venizelos (and Milton accurately links this etymologically to the concept of megalomania on p.38), supported energetically by Lloyd George. Cast in this light the destruction of Smyrna is only the most tangible instance of the willful attempt to smash the Turkish state at Sevres.

None of this excuses the atrocities perpetrated in September 1922 and the wholesale ethnic cleansing that took place in the aftermath of the Greco-Turkish war, stains that persist to this day, however the broad sweep of Milton's work helps understand why tragedies occur, and why simplistically assigning blame is seldom the correct course of action.