The greatest constriction placed by European powers over their own sovereignty occurred at the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648, whose bedrock principle was maintenance of sovereignty and self-interest over all else. Much of the book's prologue, entitled "A European Tragedy," focuses on the international tensions created by the rise of naked nationalism at the twentieth century's dawn. Nationalism was the harbinger of doom for 'The Concert of Europe' and the anti-revolutionary 'League of the Three Emperors,' which successfully calmed the vicious seas roiled by Napoleon's imperialism only a little over a century beforehand. Keegan's early embrace of the sociopolitical power structure of Europe from 1890 through 1920 remains throughout his account of the development and implementation of modern military science and technology. His comfortable relationship with sociopolitics yields a unique perspective offering readers of The First World War an opportunity to engage in a satisfying and gripping account of the world's first war. True to the spirit established in preceding books (The Second World War, Fields of Battle, and Six Armies in Normandy), Keegan focuses the analytical framework of The First World War on the effects that military science and mass transportation wrought on the world. Throughout his book, the war's key ingredients, e.g., the railroad, the transportable howitzer cannon, the submarine and aerial warfare, are interposed with the political sparks that set each country, as well as the continent itself, ablaze. Accordingly, the war's outrider was the establishment of peacetime war academies, a popular practice throughout Europe by the turn of the century.

The military academies turned out theoretical tacticians and officers who designed abstract war plans that for the first time took advantage of transportation innovations like the railroad and then married these modern innovations to meticulous train scheduling, disembarkation plans, and road mapping strategies. Lapses in judgments often laid waste to the plans and soldiers of Europe's great powers.

Keegan also points to the Schlieffen plan as the epitome of the European war academy syndrome. Not only was the Schlieffen Plan the backbone of Germany's offensive strategies in both the eastern and western fronts, but it supplied the larger strategic vehicle that enabled German generals like Moltke to induce government officials to rely utterly on its inexorable, though faulty, logic. The Second World War carefully explains that Europe's shift in war strategy, especially the Schlieffen Plan, sought impossible security of victory from mathematically certain calculations and probabilities.

Yet what were those who govern to think of static figures and numbers that never before had defined a war? Prior to WWI, plans were made on the hoof, with "plan" defined loosely as an objective to be taken as opposed to a specific schedule and strategy on which to adhere. Keegan impressively sorts through the myriad implications of this question. Government diplomats did not fully understand the intractable nature of their national security strategies when they were presented to them because they were altogether excluded from peacetime strategy. Bottlenecks such as these in concert with communications technology outstripped by advances made by its military counterparts enabled generals like Joffre, Haig, and Conrad von Hotzendorf to perpetrate the seemingly insidious orders that sent soldiers to senseless death at Gallipoli, the Somme, and Passchendaele. Keegan depicts the senselessness of the situation best when he writes, "When [the Kaiser] alone might have put brakes to the inexorable progression of the Schlieffen Plan, [the Kaiser] found he did not understand the machinery he was supposed to control, panicked and let a piece of paper determine events."

For a military historian, Keegan dedicates a refreshingly substantial amount of his book to considering the interplay of the continental relationships that failed to stymie, and instead stimulated, the War To End All Wars. He compares the harmonious climate in Europe preceding WWI's inception (which developed such interdependent national associations like the International Telegraph Union, the International Conference for Promoting Technical Uniformity in Railways and the international association for Patents and Trademarks) to the Europe that allowed a festering bilateral dispute to boil over into the world's first major war.

In the same vein, The First World War takes every opportunity to remind us that the War did not officially commence until thirty-five days after the assassination of Franz Ferdinand, nephew to the Emperor Franz Josef. Keegan's willingness to paint a backdrop to the scenery, strategy and downfall, before the eventual redemption of WWI's strategists, provides useful perspective when digesting the details of WWI's military operation.

Throughout the pages of The First World War we are exposed to Keegan's legacy, which combines the anxious pull of impossible circumstances with the drudgery and human sacrifice that comprised the First World War. With the stenches of the trenches in our nostrils, we cheer on the battle weary soldiers who throw down their weapons in frustration, defying not just their officers, but their kings and lords, as well as even the concept of nationalism itself. Of course, history dictated that nationalism would soon again seize Europe in a death grip and thereby drag the world into conflict once again.

Keegan is not oblivious to the connection between nationalism and World Wars One and Two. The expertise gained by researching this and its companion book, The Second World War, enables him to link the causes and ramifications of the two wars with impressive ease. Yet the reader is never drowned by an overabundance of terms, plans, or information. Instead, Keegan takes us on an even-paced and balanced journey that draws the reader through each passing page like a sharp needle through starched cotton.

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