He treats Germany's preparations for war as irrelevant because they failed. He minimizes all evidence of German prewar hostility to Britain, because it reflected just a sense of impotence. He overloads causal responsibility on Britain. The Germans acted because others made them do so since they did not motivate their own actions, whatever they did was unavoidable, thus irrelevant for analytical purposes.
Taylor, The Origins of the Second World War (London, 1961), Ferguson treats German policy solely as a condition for, and not a cause of, events. This argument rests on an account of diplomacy that varies between incompetent and perverse. The great problem is its thesis: Germany started World War I but Britain caused it English intervention alone made war disaster and everyone would have gained had Germany won quickly and cheaply. One would like to condemn The Pity of War, but that would not be fair one would like to praise it, but standards cannot be forgotten. By Nail Ferguson (New York, Basic Books, 1999) 563 pp. Journal of Interdisciplinary History 31.2 (2000) 254-256 For anyone wanting to understand why wars are fought, why men are willing to fight them and why the world is as it is today, there is no sharper or more stimulating guide than Niall Ferguson's The Pity of War.In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:
And yet, as Ferguson writes, while the war itself was a disastrous folly, the great majority of men who fought it did so with little reluctance and with some enthusiasm. Indeed, more British soldiers were killed in the first day of the Battle of the Somme than Americans in the Vietnam War. That the war was wicked, horrific, and inhuman is memorialized in part by the poetry of men like Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon, but also by cold statistics. The war was not inevitable, Ferguson argues, but rather was the result of the mistaken decisions of individuals who would later claim to have been in the grip of huge impersonal forces. According to Niall Ferguson, England entered into war based on naive assumptions of German aims, thereby transforming a Continental conflict into a world war, which it then badly mishandled, necessitating American involvement. The Pity of War makes a simple and provocative argument: the human atrocity known as the Great War was entirely England's fault. From a bestselling historian, a daringly revisionist history of World War I
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