SOURCE: “Slaughterhouse Jive,” in The New Republic, June 28, 1999, pp. 51-4.

In the following excerpt, Maier examines Ferguson's historical arguments and unconventional conclusions in The Pity of War.

The British have taken to most of their wars. Slow learners who are sometimes handicapped at first by their own dismissive prejudices about the enemy, they usually recoup their losses in the decisive final periods, in part because of stolid battlefield virtues, in part because they know how to sustain coalitions. And they write about their wars very well, whether as memoir, poetry, novel, or history. World War I remains perhaps the preeminent object of this continual memory work. Not without reason: it cost the British about three-quarters of a million dead, twice the toll of World War II.

For Europe as a whole, it was the seminal catastrophe of the twentieth century, interrupting the accumulation of wealth, the cosmopolitan interchange...