198 years ago today, the Battle of the Marne was raging. When it ended a few days later, the Germans were forced to withdraw from their advance positions near Paris and the Western Front of World War I ceased to be a war of maneuver. An almost unbroken line of trenches would stretch from the Belgian coast to the Swiss border and, despite the tragic and colossal waste of some of the best and brightest talents of Europe, running into the millions, no serious territorial gains would be made by either side until 1918.

Barbara Tuchman spent much of her life studying the world that ended at the Marne, and this study is memorialized in two books (which I bought in the Library of America's one volume edition), The Proud Tower and The Guns of August. The latter is by far the more famous, and she won a Pulitzer Prize on its merits.

However, I personally enjoyed the former of the two books, which she wrote after The Guns of August. Both books are written with a narrative style that is fresh and dynamic. As history books, in which the author must fight against a too literal recitation of facts (or, alternatively, too much editorializing and personal opinion), go, Tuchman's are some of the best. I rank her on a par with Massie or Wedgwood in the art of narrative history. The personalities are vividly described, the actions and consequences are felt with a sense of immediacy.

The first book (chronologically, though written later) covers European society from 1892-1914. Tuchman writes about the English aristocracy, the anarchist movement, the socialist movement, German militarism and the Dreyfus Affair, and shows the backdrop against which World War I took place. It is a wonderful sketch of the period and fascinating reading. At the same time, when I started the second book, which covers the outbreak of the war up to the Battle of the Marne, there was a sense that The Proud Tower had been superfluous reading.

So palpable is the break with the pre-war era at the outset of the First World War that all of the issues mentioned in The Proud Tower seemed nearly irrelevant. Echoes of the issues would arise in more terrible and destructive forms after the war - the anti-semitism of the Dreyfus Affair seems quaint and parochial when compared with the evil of the Holocaust, and the posturing of the French socialist maximalists is childish when compared with the bloodstained hands of the Bolshevik murderers who ran Russia from 1918 on. German militarism only became more rabid, irrational and, sadly, effective. However, the world described in The Proud Tower was obliterated through the physical annihilation of millions of the minds who shaped that society.

When reading The Guns of August, the sheer madness of the First World War is shown in stark relief. It was a war that no one needed, fought by governments that were criminally reckless in their lack of preparedness and incompetence in execution of the war, and led to such a wholesale slaughter without any regard for protecting the lives of the soldiers called to fight in it that even the most martial reader will be disgusted beyond belief. In short, the war was a textbook for why not to fight and how not to fight.

Tuchman highlights the collective madness that seized the governments of Europe at the time, paying special attention to all of the instances when individuals had it in their power to stop one aspect of the war or another, yet stood idle or resigned themselves to let the series of events play themselves out without making any effort to alter their course. Based on a reading of Tuchman, no one can come away with an impression other than that it was the German Kaiser (whom Tuchman alternately refers to, in the same book, as "William" and Wilhelm in various spots without any discernible reason, which irritated me personally) who forced the war. The French wanted to avoid it, the English wanted to avoid it, the Russians should have wanted to avoid it, and the Austrians would have probably agreed to Serbia's terms if not for the Kaiser.

However, once the dirty business started, the decisions of the armies were so revolting that I was indignant that more of the generals were not drawn and quartered. Sukhomlinov of Russia didn't see the need for more arms or ammunition factories, or really, any sort of planning. The Russians used open wireless signals for military messages, which let the Germans know exactly where they were and what they were doing. The French army insisted on wearing bright red pants because they "looked better", and their entire strategy revolved around attacking with inferior numbers because they had a better "fighting spirit". The British cavalry commanders argued that sabers were better than rifles (the first enemy machinegun positions corrected this error), and Sir John French wanted to cut and run with the entire BEF, abandoning France to the Germans. The French didn't believe in heavy artillery and had nothing heavier than 75mm guns. The Germans thought that burning villages in Belgium (including Louvain with its priceless library) and slaughtering civilians would somehow suppress partisan attacks. All sides thought the war would be over by Christmas 1914.

Reading the casualties for each day, seeing the tens of thousands of dead and hearing about the piles of corpses in just the first days, I was shocked that it would or could continue as it did. France was losing more people each week (and in some cases, in one day) than the US has lost in all its wars of the Twenty First Century combined. When it was over, 1 in 28 Frenchmen were dead, a higher ratio of dead to total population than any other belligerent nation and a factor in France's swift defeat of 1940. However, Germany didn't fare much better, with a loss ratio of 1 to 32 per capita.

Tuchman's book does not chart the course of the war, nor does she really need to. Having read Martin Gilbert's two-volume history of the war, it is clear that the senseless slaughter of the next four years was a repeat of the same mistakes of 1914 - absurd political notions and criminal execution by incompetent generals. The Somme, Verdun, Chemin-des-Dames, Ypres...the battles all blend into a morass of mud, artillery barrages, barbed wire, Pyrrhic victories followed by tactical withdrawals, all over a few hundred yards of worthless land clogged with the festering corpses of the dead and the moaning cries of the dying.

The Guns of August brought home the willful murder of millions of soldiers by stubborn and ineffective generals, who seemed to think that throwing ever more men into suicidal charges would work. It showed the failed politics of a world that was changing too fast for its leaders to appreciate, and above all it showed why war must never be taken lightly or begun on a whim.

Both books are well worth the read. There is plenty of material for people who enjoy all sorts of history, and they are also the sort of history books that are likely to appeal to the reader who rarely if ever reads history.