Persian Version

THE EVE OF 1914--Theodor Wolff-- Knopf ($4.50).

By last week there were few men still alive who believed in the divine inspiration of the Treaty of Versailles. The world no longer believed what the Allies put in writing in 1919: that Germany and its allies were solely responsible for the War. But to readers who still took the unreconstructed view that the Western World had been invaded in 1914 by a barbarian horde, an Xerxes' host, Theodor Wolff's study of war origins would seem a surprisingly civilized Persian version. The Eve of 1914 let no unsuspected wildcat out of the bag but recounted in scholarly, Teutonic detail the train of gunpowder facts that led from 1909 to the explosion five years later. Laymen found it hard going, but historians hailed it as important, called it the best study of war origins since Sidney Fay's The Origins of the World War. Was there any one person or thing responsible for the War's outbreak? If there was, says Author Wolff, its name was Prestige. But he seeks no simplified cause, finds no men of straw. Whatever may have been the basic cause, the accessories before the fact were incapacity, irresponsibility. As an eyewitness to Germany's fatal mistakes, Author Wolff lists many. She sacrificed England's all-important neutrality for a big navy. Her diplomatic service was "a stronghold of anarchy.'' The Kaiser's vacillating hysteria played hob with any sensible, straightforward policy. Author Wolff quotes some of the revealing marginalia the Kaiser was fond of jotting on state papers ("Bosh!" "What does this civilian know about it!" "Poltroon!" "Idiocy!"), gives several instances when his angry orders, if carried out, would have meant instant war. Of such diplomats as Russia's Isvolsky, Austria's Berchtold, England's Grey, he writes with temperate disapproval.

The Balkan wars, curtain raiser to the big show, gave both Austria and Russia the dangerous feeling that each had sacrificed more power and prestige than the other. Author Wolff does not believe that the War was inevitable. If Germany had not let Austria have her head in dealing with Serbia after Serajevo, if news of Serbia's satisfactory reply to Austria's ultimatum had not been suppressed for three crucial days--in short, if Germany had not taken too long a gambling chance for the sake of bluffing her opponents, peace might have been preserved. Author Wolff absolves plain Europeans of all nationalities (except the Serbs) from a desire for war, says: "The bringers of evil were folly, arrogance, stupidity, and the gambler's mania. The fates were not Clotho, Lachesis and Atropos, daughters of Zeus. They were a select company whose names stood at the foot of government decrees, in the official calendars, in the diplomatic sections of the Almanack de Gotha, in the Army Lists, the world's Press lists, the general directories, the telephone directories, and the membership lists of the Academic, the Shakespeare societies, and the Goethe-Verein."

The Author, born (1868) & bred in Berlin but now an exile from Hitler's Germany, began writing for the Berliner Tage-blatt, Germany's No. 1 newspaper, when he was 19. After a term as Paris correspondent he became editor-in-chief in 1906, left his job and his country at the same time. A pacifist and a liberal. Editor Wolff was one of the founders, with one-time Democrat Hjalmar Schacht, of the Democratic Party.

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