Books: The weight of the world

The difference between state-sponsored murder and what happened during the Great War comes down to legalities, writes Bron Sibree

1914: The Year The World Ended ****

Paul Ham (Random House, R525)

Historian Paul Ham is drawn to the fault lines of history like a moth to a flame. For the author of such acclaimed works as Kokoda, Vietnam: The Australian War, Hiroshima Nagasaki and Sandakan, the lure lies in probing the less examined, the forgotten and the flawed in a quest to find answers to lingering questions.

"Questions," argues Ham, "that haven't been answered by the major histories we already have." This, coupled with "a very strong sense that we have not been told the truth", has driven all his work to date, including his latest and perhaps most ambitious offering, 1914: The Year The World Ended.

"There's a long history of opinion about the war which states that somehow the world stumbled or groped into this abyss, and I've never bought that," he says. Indeed, the idea that this war was unavoidable, or that it was, in the words of Lloyd George, Britain's prime minister, the result of "the hand of destiny", is just one of several myths Ham debunks in his meticulously researched history.

The book also questions the idea that colonial ambition caused the war, as well as the oft-quoted role played in triggering it by the assassination of Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand, and the notion that Germany was the arch aggressor.

Ham first began trawling through the archives in 2009, asking himself, "Why did they keep fighting for four long years with 37000000 casualties and the entire destruction of their systems of government and their empires?"

His answers bring into sharp focus the July crisis of 1914 that led to the declaration of war, but also place emphasis on the half-century that came before, following the diplomatic to-ing and fro-ing between the great powers to reveal that, even as late as 1914, the divisions in Europe were not irreparable.

A consummate storyteller, Ham brings a page-turning immediacy to the labyrinthine web of geo-political intrigue, personal ambition, inept diplomacy, incessant misunderstandings and rampant xenophobia that simmered away behind doors in the European corridors of power.

Ham scrutinises and documents the emotions of what he calls those "few powerful old aristocratic men who brought war on the world" in a way that no previous history has managed before.

"What comes through in the leaders of the great powers of Europe, whether they're Prime Minister, King, Kaiser, Emperor, Tsar, Foreign Secretaries or Foreign Ministers, is a kind of extreme belligerence and even paranoia towards each other, coloured by misunderstanding and incomprehension," he says.

In the face of all the evidence he's unearthed, Ham now believes that "only a legal construction differentiates the Great War from state-sponsored murder. It was a war that was utterly avoidable, utterly unnecessary and unjust and it disgusts me how easily it could have been prevented."

For this 52-year-old journalist-turned- historian who has been in thrall to history since the age of 10, it's the human story that draws him, the way war affects nations and societies. "We go through our lives blind to the fact that great nations have committed acts of terrible violence which have shaped our world," he says, "and it is only by studying that history and learning from it that we can free ourselves from its great weight."

@BronSibree