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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 March 2014
THIS ARTICLE USES THE CONCEPT OF ‘UNDERCOMPREHENSION’ to review some of the principal features of the European experience during the years from c. 1910 to c. 1920. It does so in the belief that this is a decade during which the sort of frailties of judgment signalled by that term were singularly catastrophic in their effects; and it reminds us that the year in which we commemorate the 75th anniversary of the outbreak of the Great War is also the one in which we mark the 50th anniversary of the start of a second huge conflict whose causes are themselves rooted in the circumstances of the first. Reference to such an historical case-study can be particularly valuable insofar as the privilege of hindsight allows us not just to consider the nature of the challenges to political comprehension and action which manifested themselves at that epoch, but also to gauge (as we cannot yet do properly for our own age) the quality and outcome of the responses then elicited from statesmen, experts, or citizens.
1 These are designations which have featured particularly in recent debate about the Third Reich too: see, generally, Kershaw, I., The Nazi Dictatorship: Problems oflnterpretation (2nd ed.), London, Arnold, 1989.Google Scholar This point is all the more important when one bears in mind that the record of confused contemporary reactions to rumours about ‘the Holocaust’ might provide another very revealing historical case-study of a form of twentiethcentury ‘undercomprehension’.
2 Quoted in Joll, J., The Origins of the First World War. London, Longman, 1984, p. 6.Google Scholar
3 Quoted ibid., p. 21.
4 Memoirs, War, Vol. 1, London, Nicholson & Watson, 1938, p. 32.Google Scholar
5 See especially Germany’s Arms in the First World War, London, Chatto & Windus, 1967 Google Scholar; and War of Illusions: German Policies from 2911 to 1924, London, Chatto & Windus, 1975 Google Scholar. These works were first published in German in 1961 and 1969 respectively.
6 Europe since 1870: an International History, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1976, p. 184.Google Scholar
7 ‘The Outbreak of the First World War and German War Aims’, Journal of contemporary History, 1, 1966, p. 90.Google Scholar
8 See Supplying War: Logistics from Wallensrein to Patron, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1977, Chapter 4, ‘The Wheel that Broke’.Google Scholar
9 The Struggle for Mastery in Europe, 1848–1918, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1965, p. 529.Google Scholar
10 War and Society in Europe, 1871–1970, London, Fontana, 1984, p. 81.Google Scholar
11 The First World War and International Politics, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1988, p. 10.Google Scholar
12 The Great War, 1914–1938, London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1973, p. 26.Google Scholar
13 War in European History, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1976, p. 112.Google ScholarPubMed
14 For the shift in literary awareness, see particularly the outstanding study by Fussell, Paul, The Great War and Modern Memory, London, Oxford University Press, 1975.Google Scholar
15 Howard, op. cit., p. 120.
16 Quoted in Marwick, A., The Deluge: British Society and the First World War, Harmond‐sworth, Penguin, p. 41.Google Scholar
17 Peacemaking 1919 (reprint of revised ed. of 1943), London, Methuen 1964, p. 67.Google Scholar
18 ibid., p. 7.
19 ibid., pp. 198,202.
20 ibid., p. 70.
21 The Nation State and National Self‐Determination, London, Fontana, 1969, p. 63.Google Scholar
22 Nicolson, op. cit., p. xxiv.