ABSOLUTE DESTRUCTION. Military culture and the practices of war in Imperial Germany. Isabel V. Hull 384pp. Cornell University Press. $45; distributed in the UK by NBN. Pounds 23.50. - 0 8014 4258 3.
DECISIONS FOR WAR, 1914-1917. Richard F. Hamilton and Holger H. Herwig. 266pp.
Cambridge University Press. Pounds 35 (paperback Pounds 12.99). US $60 (paperback, $17.99). - 0 521 83679 4.
GERMANY AND THE CAUSES OF THE FIRST WORLD WAR. Mark Hewitson. 268pp. Oxford:
Berg. Pounds 47 (paperback, Pounds 15.99). US $74.95 (paperback, $24.95). - 1
85973 865 6.
THE WARLORDS. Hindenburg and Ludendorff. John Lee. 207pp. Weidenfeld and Nicolson. Pounds 16.99. (US $27.95). - 0 297 84675 2.
War is a reciprocal activity. It requires those who are attacked to fight back; if they do not, there is no conflict. Its history has, by extension, to be a comparative activity. But this creates particular problems for the study of the wars of modern Europe. Between 1864 and 1945, one power, Germany, was at the centre of both their causation and their conduct. By the end of the Second World War, its army stood accused of complicity in genocide. Here comparative military history struggles to find a footing: the historian who adjudicates on the role of the German Army in the two wars is in danger of either minimizing the atrocities it perpetrated, or -worse still -denying his or her own humanity. The First World War stands at the apex of this debate. Kaiser Wilhelm may have been guilty of giving utterance to views that were morally repugnant, but does that make him, and his Reich, outriders of what was to follow? The army which he commanded committed war crimes, but was a role model for other armies. As Isabel V. Hull observes in her stimulating, scholarly, fluent and important book, Absolute Destruction, Imperial Germany was "at the end of a spectrum which it shared with the rest of the Western world". Hitler and the Nazis, by implication, were not.
It is a surprising conclusion, given what has gone before. Hull cleaves to the German Sonderweg, the special path, although engaging with the comparative arguments. Her book is divided into three parts. The first and fullest -in terms both of research and of originality -is a study of the 1904 campaign in German South West Africa (Namibia today), in which German troops set out to exterminate the rebellious Herero. She reckons that the Herero death rate was at least 50 per cent, and may have been as high as 75 per cent. In Part Two, she argues that this genocidal war should be set not in the context of colonial war, but in that of military doctrine and culture, shaped in Germany's case by the wars of unification.
