1917: War, Peace, and Revolution

Stevenson (Arms Races in International Politics), chair in international history at the London School of Economics, adds a distinguished volume to his half-dozen major works on WWI. He focuses on the war’s forgotten year, when the nations of Europe desperately sought to escape the “war trap” they had dug since 1914. Stevenson presents this process as a study in contingencies: the hows and whys of decisions over whether “to intervene, to repudiate compromise, and to attack.” Each nation’s responsible decision-making parties were held in high regard, yet though their decisions weren’t uniformly disastrous, Stevenson writes, none fulfilled expectations. As the year opened the war “remained Germany’s to lose.” One Entente army after another “wasted itself in vain offensives”: France in Champagne, Britain in Flanders, and Italy on the Isonzo, while Russia’s post-czarist Provisional Government sought to prove it still deserved Allied support. But between January and November, unrestricted submarine warfare brought the U.S. into the conflict. The Bolshevik revolution then transformed Russia into a denier of Europe’s prewar order. Initiatives for a compromise peace collapsed and the war’s consequences spread far beyond Europe. Stevenson’s comprehensively researched and perceptively reasoned analysis stands apart from similar histories by showing that the conflict’s outcome was determined “not through blind impersonal forces but through deliberate will.” Illus. (Jan.)