Concerning the major players involved in shaping the events during the first month of World War I (August 1914), Barbara W. Tuchman wrote in the prelude to the book’s list of sources:
They seemed to have known, while they lived it, that like the French Revolution, the First World War was one of the great convolutions of history, and each felt the hand of history heavily on his own shoulder. When it was over, despite courage, skill, and sacrifice, the war they had fought proved to have been, on the whole, a monument of failure, tragedy and disillusion. It had not led to a better world. Men who had taken part at the command level, political and military, felt driven to explain their decisions and actions. Men who had fallen from high command, whether for cause or as scapegoats—and these included most of the commanders of August—wrote their private justifications. As each account appeared, inevitably shifting responsibility or blame to someone else, another was provoked.
With much insight, she elucidates through metaphor the goal of the historian who
…gropes his way trying to recapture the truth of past events and find out “what really happened.” He discovers that truth is subjective and separate, made up of little bits seen, experienced and recorded by different people. It’s like the design seen through a kaleidoscope; when the cylinder is shaken the countless colored fragments form a new picture. Yet they are the same fragments that made a different picture a moment earlier.
Tuchman, Barbara W., The Guns of August, 1962, The Random House Publishing Group, First Presidio Press Mass Market edition, p. 525.
