Nevertheless, this is what the collection of essays here amounts to, and it must be said that, despite the problem with the title, they are far from dull. If prospective purchasers of this volume bear this in mind, they will part with their money and find themselves well rewarded at the end. The fact is that Ian F.W. Beckett brings a deep knowledge to the events of World War I. What we have in these essays is the distillation of a lifetime of thought given to this conflict.

Take, for example, the first essay, ‘The Silent Conqueror’. This relates to a little-known event in 1914 when the Belgians opened the sluice gates and flooded much of their countryside to prevent the seemingly unstoppable German army from overrunning it entirely and reaching the Channel Ports, which would have endangered supply lines from Britain. It is an event of the utmost importance, yet few historians, including this one, have given it any prominence. It might be argued that in 1914 the German army was at the end of its endurance by the time the Belgians acted and that exhaustion would have saved the Allies. But, as Beckett argues, the flood put the issue beyond doubt, and this act should be as well known as such episodes as the First Battle of Ypres, which (as it were) turned the tide against the invaders.

Other essays are of equal importance. The arrival of David Lloyd George at the British Ministry of Munitions was crucial in making Britain the great arsenal of the Allied armies. It is a misconception to say that it was the intervention of the Americans, with all their industrial clout, that won the war. The United States was important as a supplier of money and raw materials, but it was the Ministry of Munitions that produced most of the weapons that were to win the war. When the British and French were overrun by the offensives that Germany launched against them on the Western Front in 1918, the weapons that were lost were replaced with great speed by the Ministry, and the gigantic bombardments that saw the Germans blasted from one defensive line to another later in the year were delivered by shells and guns produced by it. It was Lloyd George who galvanised the Ministry, and Beckett correctly identifies this moment as being as important as any of the great battles that have caught the attention of historians, to the detriment of matters of economic capacity and efficiency. 

Other essays draw attention to what indeed were the first steps in the sorry tale of escalating violence that did so much to mar the twentieth century. The Germans were the first to unleash submarine warfare against merchant shipping and the first to use aircraft to bomb civilian populations. They were not the last: between 1943 and 1945 they might have had pause to reflect on the wisdom of having been the first country to bomb civilians. A similar case could be made on the use of poison gas by the Germans. During World War I they suffered more than the Allies as the chemical plants in France, Britain, and America turned their productive capacities against the initiators of chemical weapons.

Beckett also has useful things to say about Turkey’s entry into the war and a trenchant essay on the consequences of the Balfour Declaration creating a Jewish homeland in Palestine. If this episode did not ‘make’ World War I, it certainly made a fair contribution to the making of the modern Middle East.

There is a particularly useful essay on the film of the Battle of the Somme. It might not have influenced Ken Burns, but it was a striking event nevertheless. For the first time, the general public could see moving images of a battle-field. As Beckett says, the film did not seek to conceal the detritus of war. The wounded were shown, as well as graves being prepared for the dead. It is true that some of the battle scenes were staged well behind the front line (merely because cameras in 1916 were too large to be manoeuvred into front-line trenches). But the staging showed soldiers being hit, perhaps fatally, and were as realistic as could be expected. When I show this film to students, they collapse with boredom, but, when it was first screened, certain scenes caused collapse of a different kind; some people fled from the cinema in consternation and fright. It is well to be reminded that our modern sensibilities to violence have been blunted and that this was not the case in the early years of the twentieth century. It is also useful to be reminded about the pioneering work of the cameramen who made this film – the first true war documentary.

There is one essay, however, with which I believe Ian Beckett has fallen victim to cunning Australian propaganda – or has he? The essay ‘The Making of a Nation’ is subtitled ‘Australia’s Coming of Age at Gallipoli, 25 April 1915’. What puzzles me about this essay is whether Beckett believes in his own subtitle. He spends much of the essay debunking the myth of Gallipoli and demonstrating how the campaign has been subjected to distortion through the written word and film over the years. Yet if the whole thing is a fraud and no nations were made that day, why has the essay been included? Is it that Beckett believes that Australians have appropriated the Gallipoli campaign for their own ends and now insist that we became whole only at Gallipoli? Or does he himself go along with at least part of the myth? Either interpretation may cause serious damage to historians such as Henry Reynolds, and I issue a health warning here to alert them to its dangers. On reflection, I am not sure what Beckett’s take on Gallipoli is. In my view, this essay would have been better omitted from what is an otherwise excellent collection of essays on aspects of World War I. Buy the book – read the essays. You will emerge better informed about a subject where much has been written that would have been better left unwritten.