Dreadnought by Robert K Massie

Vintage paperback

If I begin by saying that this month’s book is over one thousand pages long, I hope that doesn’t frighten anyone. It is a big book, telling a big story, and telling it with considerable force and style.

The First World War is one of the greatest disasters ever to have struck western civilisation. Even from our vantage point, nearly a hundred years later, there seems to have been no reason for it. Somehow, it just happened.

Robert K. Massie tells the story of how the First World War came about. This is a history book, but Massie approaches the subject like a biographer. Each section of the book is devoted to an individual who, over the forty or fifty years leading up the outbreak of was in 1914, played a part in the complex unfolding of events. It is a glittering cast.

There is the Kaiser, William II, by turns uncertain and confident, easily influenced and determined, insecure and yet arrogant. And around him are his ministers and advisers – Frederick von Holstein, who toiled unseen in a backroom of the German Foreign Minister for years; Alfred von Tirpitz, the ruthless Grand Admiral with a remarkable forked beard who became Father of the High Seas Fleet; Bernard von Bülow, elegant, cultured and sycophantic. The list goes on.

On the British side, there was Queen Victoria and then King Edward VIII, who was the Kaiser’s uncle and regarded his nephew as little short of a complete fool. There was Lord Salisbury, the last truly aristocratic Prime Minister, who passed the job to his nephew, Arthur Balfour, lazy, intellectual and charming. There was Jackie Fisher, the volatile and eccentric admiral who revolutionised naval warfare; Winston Churchill, a young man returned from adventures in Africa who believed himself destined for great things; and Sir Edward Grey, a sad man, mourning his dead wife, who loved fishing beyond politics and who sought desperately to avoid war.

From these characters and many more, Robert K Massie weaves a narrative which moves from South Africa to the Norwegian fjords, from London and Berlin to St Petersburg and Constantinople. Somewhere and somehow, kings and their advisers, politicians and military men, people who believed they were serving their country, got caught up in events which grew and grew until the terrible moment when Sir Edward Grey, the British Foreign Secretary, uttered the tragic words; “The lamps are going out all over Europe…”

Laurence Bristow-Smith
British Consul General