Tuchman - The guns of August

BRILLIANT EXCITING.
The Washington Post

I have been unable to put this book down Barbara W. Tuchman writes brilliantly and inspiringly Battlefield scenes, strategic problems and the rise and fall of powerful personalities are all part of Mrs. Tuchmans canvas The Guns of August is lucid, fair, critical, and witty.

C YRILL F ALLS
The New York Times Book Review

Brilliant Her narrative grips the mind; she does not need maps Instead, she uses excellent descriptions of places and, above all, puts emphasis on the commanders and how they made their decisions.

The New Yorker

The Guns of August is a fine demonstration that with sufficient art rather specialized history can be raised to the level of literature [Tuchman] is a writer of wit and grace. Her prose is elegant and polished without being fancy or formal. She has a sardonic sense of humor and an original mind. Her passing comments are quotable and trenchant. Her ability is exceptional in juggling a dozen scenes of simultaneous action, in clarifying the technicalities of military operations and in maintaining a judicious objectivity.

The New York Times

By Barbara W. Tuchman

BIBLE AND SWORD (1956)

THE ZIMMERMANN TELEGRAM (1958)

THE GUNS OF AUGUST (1962)

THE PROUD TOWER (1966)

STILWELL AND THE AMERICAN EXPERIENCE IN CHINA (1971)

NOTES FROM CHINA (1972)

A DISTANT MIRROR (1978)

PRACTICING HISTORY (1981)

THE MARCH OF FOLLY (1984)

THE FIRST SALUTE (1988)

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The human heart is the starting point of all matters pertaining to war.

M ARCHAL DE S AXE
Reveries on the Art of War (Preface), 1732

The terrible Ifs accumulate.

W INSTON C HURCHILL
The World Crisis, Vol. I, Chap. XI

D URING THE LAST WEEK of January, 1962, John Glenn delayed for the third time his attempt to rocket into space and become the nations first earth-orbiting human. Bill Moose Skowren, the Yankees veteran first baseman, having had a good year (561 at bats, 28 home runs, 89 runs batted in), was given a $3,000 raise which elevated his annual salary to $35,000. Franny and Zooey was at the top of the fiction bestseller list, followed a few notches down by To Kill a Mockingbird. At the top of the nonfiction list was My Life in Court by Louis Nizer. That week also saw the publication of one of the finest works of history written by an American in our century.

The Guns of August was an immediate, overwhelming success. Reviewers were enthusiastic and word-of-mouth quickly attracted readers by the tens of thousands. President Kennedy gave a copy to Prime Minister Macmillan, observing that somehow contemporary statesmen must avoid the pitfalls that led to August, 1914. The Pulitzer Committee, forbidden by the donors will to reward a work on a non-American subject with the Prize for History, found a solution by awarding Mrs. Tuchman a Prize for General Nonfiction. The Guns of August made the authors reputation; her work thereafter was gripping and elegant, but most readers needed only to know that the new book was by Barbara Tuchman.

What is it about this bookessentially a military history of the first month of the First World Warwhich gives it its stamp and has created its enormous reputation? Four qualities stand out: a wealth of vivid detail which keeps the reader immersed in events, almost as an eyewitness; a prose style which is transparently clear, intelligent, controlled, and witty; a cool detachment of moral judgmentMrs. Tuchman is never preachy or reproachful; she draws on skepticism, not cynicism, leaving the reader not so much outraged by human villainy as amused and saddened by human folly. These first three qualities are present in all of Barbara Tuchmans work, but in The Guns of August there is a fourth which makes the book, once taken up, almost impossible to set aside. Remarkably, she persuades the reader to suspend any foreknowledge of what is about to happen. Her narrative sets in motion a gigantic German Armythree field armies, sixteen army corps, thirty-seven divisions, 700,000 menwheeling through Belgium, marching on Paris. This tidal wave of men, horses, artillery and carts is cascading down the dusty roads of northern France, sweeping implacably, apparently irresistibly, toward its goal of seizing the city and ending the war in the West, just as the the Kaisers generals had planned, within six weeks. The reader, watching the Germans advance, may already know that they wont arrive, that von Kluck will turn aside and that, after the Battle of the Marne, millions of men on both sides will stumble into the trenches to begin their endurance of four years of slaughter. And yet, so great is Mrs. Tuchmans skill that the reader forgets what he knows. Surrounded by the thunder of guns, the thrust and parry of bayonet and sabre, he becomes almost a participant. Will the exhausted Germans keep coming? Can the desperate French and British hold? Will Paris fall? Mrs. Tuchmans triumph is that she makes the events of August, 1914, as suspenseful on the page as they were to the people living through them.

When The Guns of August appeared, Barbara Tuchman was described in the press as a fifty-year-old housewife, a mother of three daughters, and the spouse of a prominent New York City physician. The truth was more complicated and interesting. She was descended from two of the great intellectual and commercial Jewish families of New York City. Her grandfather, Henry Morgenthau, Sr., was Ambassador to Turkey during the First World War. Her uncle, Henry Morgenthau, Jr., was Franklin Roosevelts Secretary of the Treasury for over twelve years. Mrs. Tuchmans father, Maurice Wertheim, had founded an investment banking house. Her childhood homes were a five-story brownstone on the Upper East Side, at which a French governess read aloud to her from Racine and Corneille, and a country house with barns and horses in Connecticut. There were dinners with a father who had forbidden mention of Franklin D. Roosevelt. One day, the adolescent daughter transgressed and was commanded to leave her chair. Sitting very straight, Barbara said, I am too old to be sent away from the table. Her father stared in amazementbut she remained.

When the time came for Mrs. Tuchman to graduate from Radcliffe, she skipped the ceremony, preferring to accompany her grandfather to the World Monetary and Economic Conference in London where he headed the U.S. delegation. She spent a year in Tokyo as a research assistant for the Institute of Pacific Relations, and then became a fledgling writer at The Nation, which her father had bought to save it from bankruptcy. At twenty-four, she covered the Spanish Civil War from Madrid.

In June, 1940, on the day Hitler entered Paris, she married Dr. Lester Tuchman in New York City. Dr. Tuchman, about to go off to war, believed that the world just then was an unpromising place to bring up children. Mrs. Tuchman replied that if we wait for the outlook to improve, we might wait forever and that if we want a child at all, we should have it now, regardless of Hitler. The first of their daughters was born nine months later. During the forties and fifties, Mrs. Tuchman dovetailed raising children and writing her first books.