Before the Scorched Band

THE PROUD TOWER by Barbara W. Tuchman. 528 pages. Macmillan. $7.95.

November 1912. From the pulpit of the cathedral in Basle, France's Jean Jaures faced 555 fellow Socialists of 23 nations, gathered to demonstrate the supposed unity of the world's workers against war. The tolling of church bells reminded Jaures of Schiller's Song of the Bells: "I summon the living, I mourn the dead, I break the furnaces." Cried Jaures: "I call on the living that they may defend themselves from the monster who appears on the horizon. I weep for the countless dead now rotting in the East. I will break the thunderbolts of war which menace from the skies." Eighteen months later, Jaures was dead of bullets fired by a youthful assassin who found such pacifism unpatriotic. On the day of his burial--Aug. 4, 1914--World War I became general. Writes Historian Barbara Tuchman: "Overhead the bells he had invoked in Basle tolled for him and all the world, 'I summon the living, I mourn the dead.' "

Human Tide. The phrase is characteristic of both the emotion and the viewpoint of this new book in which Author Tuchman sets out to "discover the quality of the world from which the Great War came"--whose guns she set thundering memorably in Guns of August two years ago. Granddaughter of a onetime ambassador to Turkey, niece of former Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau Jr., a Radcliffe graduate ('33) and wife of a Park Avenue physician, Mrs. Tuchman proved in Guns that she could write better military history than most men. In this sequel, she tells her story with cool wit and warm understanding, eschewing both the sweeping generalizations of a Toynbee and the minute-by-minute simplicisms of a Walter Lord.

Though the author imposes no patterns, a pattern emerges. The patrician and idle society of the past was in its last days. The industrial revolution had produced new men, with new ideas that were sometimes wildly impractical, often idealistic, but always intent on making themselves felt. Her book amounts to a close-up view of the clash between them.

Pretty Sight. Her chosen time span begins in 1890. In Britain, gentlemen still peered out of their club windows at passing carriages and told each other "what a pretty thing it was to see a lovely woman drive in London behind a well-matched pair," and nobody wanted "to think about making money, only about spending it." In office at Westminster was "the last government in the Western world to possess all the attributes of aristocracy in working condition." Prime Minister Robert Arthur Talbot Gascoyne-Cecil, Lord Salisbury, was dedicated to the principle that a nation should be ruled by its "natural" leaders --those with fortune and position so secure "that the struggles for ambition are not defiled by the taint of sordid greed." His successor was his nephew, Arthur Balfour, a languid genius with so exquisitely balanced an intellect that once, arriving for an evening party at a house whose staircase was split into two curves, he stood for 20 minutes at the bottom trying to find a logical reason for ascending by one side or the other. In France, it was a time when the Comte de La Rochefoucauld could still remark seriously of another aristocrat that his family were "mere nobodies in the year 1000."

Such men could hardly be expected to hear the hum of machinery that was changing their world, the increasingly impudent demands of the newly prosperous middle classes, even the crash of anarchist bombs. Says Tuchman: "So enchanting was the vision of a stateless society, without government, without law, without ownership of property, in which, corrupt institutions having been swept away, man would be free to be good as God intended him, that six heads of state were assassinated for its sake in the 20 years before 1914. Not one could qualify as a tyrant. Their deaths were the gestures of desperate or deluded men to call attention to the Anarchist idea." As an individualist, she obviously feels a certain sympathy for the anarchist idea--"the last cry of individual man, the last movement among the masses on behalf of individual liberty, the last hope of living unregulated, the last fist shaken against the encroaching State before the State, the party, the union, the organization closed in."

Between Two Epochs. Mrs. Tuchman finds equal significance in the Dreyfus Affair: "While it lasted, France exhibited, as in the Revolution, political man at his most combative. Men plunged up to the hilt of their capacities and beliefs. They held nothing back. On the eve of the new century the Affair revealed what energies and ferocities were at hand to greet it." And as Jaures' death dramatized, it was the era in which the Socialist notion that all the workers of the world could unite on anything turned out to be fantasy.

The Great War of 1914-18, concludes Historian Tuchman, "lies like a band of scorched earth dividing that time from ours. In wiping out so many lives which would have been operative on the years that followed, in destroying beliefs, changing ideas, and leaving incurable wounds of disillusion, it created a physical as well as psychological gulf between two epochs."

But she looks back with frank nostalgia to the "proud tower" which had been destroyed. "Its inhabitants lived, as compared to a later time, with more self-reliance, more confidence, more hope; greater magnificence, extravagance and elegance; more careless ease, more gaiety, more pleasure in each other's company and conversation, more injustice and hypocrisy, more misery and want, more sentiment including false sentiment, less sufferance of mediocrity, more dignity in work, more delight in nature, more zest."

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