Review of the same book by American military historian Max Boot.

"World War I continues to be misunderstood by most ordinary people who have not yet caught up with the evolving consensus of historians. Three big myths, in particular, dominate the popular perception. First, that it was an accident, a war nobody wanted — a view immortalized in Barbara Tuchman's beautifully written if factually questionable 1962 book "The Guns of August." Second, that it didn't really matter who won — that there was scant difference between the Central and Entente Powers. And third, that soldiers were needlessly sent to slaughter by unfeeling and cloddish generals — "lions led by donkeys" in the popular parlance.

In "Catastrophe 1914: Europe Goes to War," the prolific British military historian Max Hastings does an excellent job of assembling a chronicle of the war's first few months, from August to December 1914, that puts paid to all three perceptions"

"Hastings also argues that it is unfair to blame the ineptitude of these generals for the horrible stalemate that took hold during the fall of 1914. This deadlock was almost inevitable given that the armies fighting one another were so closely matched in size and capabilities. Only after four years of war, by which time Germany had been exhausted and America had joined with Britain and France, would it be possible to end the impasse.

"There was never a credible shortcut," Hastings concludes. For all the glamour associated with peripheral struggles in Africa and the Middle East, which produced heroes like Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck and T. E. Lawrence, the war's outcome could be decided only in Western Europe and only after a prolonged period of mutual battering. "