Book Review: A Mad Catastrophe

A Mad Catastrophe: The Outbreak of World War I and the Collapse of the Habsburg Empireby Geoffrey WawroBasic Books, 2014"The Habsburgs and the Ottomans," Geoffrey Wawro writes in his contribution to the publishing world's WWI-mania, A Mad Catastrophe: The Outbreak of World War I and the Collapse of the Habsburg Empire, "were engaged in a race to the bottom for the title of Europe's Sick Man, the great power most likely to wither and die in everyone's lifetime." The death in particular of the Austro-Hungarian empire is the focus of Wawro's book, and that death was less about withering than about writhing and thrashing. He traces the rapid deterioration of the Dual Monarchy in the half-century leading up to the execution of Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo, which triggered a cascade of events that prompted Germany to drag Austro-Hungary into a war their alliance couldn't possible win. Wawro is clearer about the inevitability of that defeat - and its reasons - than most writers on the subject ever allow themselves to be:

General Erich Ludendorff, who took over the German war effort from 1916 to the end, made a statement that encapsulated his strategic failings. "Tactics," he wrote, "have to be considered before purely strategic objects, which are futile to pursue unless tactical success is possible." That much was true - the strategic plans of the Entente and Central Powers generally failed because assaulting trenches could not achieve them - but Ludendorff's conceit was to believe that by refining his tactics he could overcome the insuperable strategic challenge of the war: how would an Austro-German alliance of 120 million defeat an Entente alliance of 260 million that wielded more troops, more ships, and 60 percent more national income than the Central Powers? Superb at tactics, the Germans were appalling at strategy, avoiding the frank net assessment of themselves and the Austrians that would have led them to seek a diplomatic solution, not war, in July 1914.

The quote is indicative: Wawro's book is a splendidly readable account of the floundering and haphazard piecemeal death of the Austro-Hungarian state in the heat of war. He gives us the vicious, brutal, and generally incompetent Dual Monarchy officer corps, the morose and domineering German general staff, and, in depressingly abundant detail, accounts from the thousands of less exalted men pressed into service and seeing on all sides the waste and futility of what they'd been ordered to do. When dissecting the logistics of the Austro-Hungarian forces in the field - as he does at great length especially in his book's second half - Wawro skillfully combines perfectly-chosen details with perfectly-chosen quotes in a way that sticks in the memory:

A new category appeared on Austrian casualty lists: marod, dienstuntauglich (broken, unusable). Soon this category began to outnumber killed, wounded, and missing. Austrian prisoners interviewed by an American diplomat in Nis revealed that they had eaten nothing but plums and water in the days before their capture. "The army leadership is killing us," one Austrian officer scribbled. "We've been in nonstop action for a month, barefoot, without bread, living on horsemeat."

Wawro is no friend to the sloppy, wasteful monarchies at the heart of his story, and he unhesitatingly sets at their feet the main responsibility for the war itself. That strong undercurrent of carefully-controlled indignation gives A Mad Catastrophe a good measure of its headlong energy, and his sharp writing skills (as when, for instance, he paints a haunting picture of the plagues that stalked the third Austrian invasion of Serbia in October of 1914; "typhus," he tells us, "carried into Serbia in the belly of some Austro-Hungarian trooper, would end up killing one-third of the population of Serbia") supply the rest of the book's appeal. Publishing mania or not, 2014's history readers are reaping some great volumes from the Great War's centenary, and this book is among the strongest of those.