The president of France's Third Republic, Raymond Poincaré, epitomized 1917 as the “troubled” year. It was troubled diplomatically (by peace offers both overt and secret), strategically (how to break the war's seeming impasse), politically (by increasing Socialist influence), militarily (with disasters in France at the Chemin des Dames, in Italy at Caporetto, and in Flanders), and socially (strikes, mutiny, and even revolution).
The great merit of David Stevenson's most recent volume, 1917: War, Peace, and Revolution, is that he synthesizes the events of this troubled year with his usual clarity, analyzing them not only individually but also in their interactions. Stevenson's overarching theme is the “association” of the United States with the Entente powers in April 1917 and the two Russian revolutions that ended Russia's role as one of those Entente powers. This thematic approach means that occasionally chronology has to be abandoned, although not entirely, as America's entrance in April 1917 pre-dates Russia's exit after the October Revolution. He organizes the book into three parts: the first concerns the Atlantic Ocean, with chapters on German submarines, America's declaration of war, and the British adoption of convoy; the second returns to land, to the European continent and the battles fought there despite (or because of) the various offers of peace; and the third expands the scope globally to consider the nations which joined the Entente powers after the war's opening months, the national aspirations of India, and the future of Palestine. The introduction and conclusion round out the necessary chronology, with respectively a brief account of events before 1917 and a review of the most significant consequences of 1917's events as they affected the outcome in the war's final year.
Stevenson's approach focuses on decision-making processes. He does not deal with the men who drowned in Passchendaele mud, the political demands of French mutineers, or the calorific value of the food available to either German or Russian countrywomen. Instead he concentrates on those policy makers who took decisions either to join or to continue with a war that seemed to have no military future, and to offer or to reject a negotiated peace. In adopting this methodology, Stevenson returns to the first postwar generation of historians, who wrote the diplomatic history of the war. He also follows the approach, for example, of Christopher Clark's The Sleepwalkers (2013) and the large number of historians who have written on 1914 and the outbreak of the First World War before and during these centenary years.
As always, Stevenson supports his statements with multinational sources, both archival and published, and provides telling statistics to illustrate them. It would be easier, however, for the student or general reader to navigate the text if Stevenson (or the publisher?) had provided subheadings within each chapter or else, at least, had left a line between sections. Chapters often include a statement of the “stages” or “phases” through which Stevenson discusses the topic under consideration, but the reader is then left to navigate alone. Indeed, any reader lacking general background knowledge of the personalities and decision-makers would need some guidance, as the provision of a useful “List of Principal Personalities” suggests. That the list extends to ten full pages is an indication of the depth and breadth of Stevenson's coverage.
Furthermore, despite the reputation of the book's academic publisher, it contains an unusually large number of typographical errors. In the bibliography, for example, the title of Adam Tooze's study of the new world order is given as 1961–1931. It is a simple transposition mistake—61 instead of 16—but a glaring example that should have been easy to spot. More importantly, in the notes to chapter 7, the diaries of Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig have migrated from Edinburgh to the Liddell Hart Centre in King's College London. This reader wonders whether pressure from the publisher for the book to appear in 2017, the centenary year of the events being examined, meant a lack of time for greater care in proofreading.
Stevenson's concluding chapter provides both a chronological conclusion—looking forward “Towards 1918,” to the second Russian revolution and departure from the war, to Germany's final gamble in a huge spring offensive, and to the American escalation of its war effort—and a brief (396–98) summary of the book's theme: the key decisions that went far to determining the war's outcome. Stevenson ends his fine book on an emotional note. The international system underlying the risks and difficulties facing decision-makers in 1917 constituted “an appalling vehicle for the conduct of human affairs” (398).
