World War I

The first account says the war had an aggressor, and the aggressor was Germany.

When Austria-Hungary moved to punish Serbia, Berlin promised it unconditional support, a blank cheque, even at the risk of a European war. Germany then invaded neutral Belgium to reach Paris fast, breaking a treaty it had signed itself.

In nineteen sixty one the German historian Fritz Fischer worked through the imperial German archives and found Berlin's own war aims: annexations in Belgium and France and a colonial empire in central Africa, drafted that same September while German armies still expected to win.

The German chancellor, Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg, once asked the British ambassador in astonishment why Britain would fight over a treaty. The ambassador reported his own words home.

For the victors, Versailles was accountability, not vengeance. France had lost one point four million dead and seen its industrial north wrecked in the German retreat. The state that started the war would pay to rebuild what it destroyed.

The second account says the war looked defensive from Berlin, not aggressive.

Russia ordered general mobilization on July thirtieth, nineteen fourteen, before Germany did. Germany faced a two front war and struck France first through Belgium, planning to turn east afterward.

This was the Schlieffen Plan: a gamble born of geography, in this account, not a scheme of conquest.

The British naval blockade cut off food and fertilizer imports, and by the winter of nineteen sixteen German civilians were surviving on rationed turnips. Malnutrition and disease from that blockade killed hundreds of thousands of them.

In the autumn of nineteen eighteen the German army was still holding enemy territory. Its own high command asked for the armistice and let the new government sign it and take the blame.

When the peace terms arrived, the German minister Philipp Scheidemann rose before the National Assembly, and resigned rather than sign them.

The third account is the one the governments could not describe: what it was actually like in the trenches.

To cross the ground between the lines, no man's land, meant walking into machine gun fire across barbed wire. Chlorine gas rolled across the front at Ypres in April nineteen fifteen, followed by phosgene and mustard gas that blinded and burned.

Men who survived it physically intact still broke down with what doctors began calling shell shock.

The British poet Wilfred Owen served in those trenches and was killed leading his men across a canal on November fourth, nineteen eighteen, one week before the armistice.

He wrote of a gas victim to expose what he called the old lie: that it is sweet and fitting to die for one's country.

The fourth account says the name world war was earned in the colonies, and the colonies paid a price Europe's memory of the war rarely counts.

More than a million Indian soldiers served overseas, from Flanders to Mesopotamia to East Africa, and at least sixty two thousand of them died. Of the tirailleurs who fought in Europe, around thirty thousand were killed.

The East African campaign ran on the backs of African porters. At least ninety five thousand carriers of the British Carrier Corps died there, most of disease and exhaustion.

An anonymous Indian soldier, in a letter home the wartime censors read and kept, put it in five words.

In nineteen nineteen, the men who had crossed oceans to fight for freedom came home to find they still did not have their own. British led troops opened fire on an unarmed crowd at Amritsar that April.

The fifth account says the argument over who caused the war has never actually been settled.

Fritz Fischer's nineteen sixty one archival work forced most historians to accept that German leaders were willing to risk a general war. Others point instead to the alliance system, the naval arms race, and railway mobilization timetables that once triggered could not be stopped for diplomacy to work.

The centenary brought the pendulum back toward shared responsibility, in a book whose title supplied the metaphor everyone still uses.

Christopher Clark called the leaders of nineteen fourteen sleepwalkers.

On one point, at least, the historians largely agree. John Maynard Keynes warned this same peace would produce another catastrophe within a generation, and he was right.