military

David Stevenson has written a superb history of the First World War that describes how and why the war lasted for over four years. The first factor according to Stevenson was the unreal war goals of both of the combatants. Another factor was that all of the great powers were able to keep large armies on the field for an indefinite amount of time due to advances in medicine. Military technology impeded further advances on the front since railways could transport troops to threatend sectors of the front and thereby making any future breathroughs by either side impossible. The final factors was the support of elites and the ability of the governments to alleviate economic hardships on the homefront due to stipends to farmers and wives of servicemen. The Austro-Hungarian, Ottoman, Russian, and later German empires fell because they lacked public mobilization and were unable to tend to the hardships of their citizens.In the end the allies won beacuse they were able to out produce the Germans and had better tactics that allowed sustainable advances by the British and French forces. Stevenson concludes his book by stating that the Peace Treaty of Versailles failed not because of harsh penalites, but because the Russians and the Americans were left out of any postwar security arrangements. The main weakness of the book is that it tends to be somewhat dry and academic and probably will not appear to readers of popular history.Another failing of this book is that the author does not fully described the faults of Russian munition makers as written in Jonathan Grant's work about the Puitilov factory. Otherwise, I would highly reccomend this book to those who are serious students of European and military history.