In the Trenches, Digging Deeper

The bloodied shirt that haunts the cover of Sean McMeekin's new book on the lead-up to World War I offers a grim reminder that the slaughter of 10 million essentially began with the killing of one.

Not that the assassination of Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the shirt's doomed owner, on June 28, 1914, immediately portended catastrophe. In London and Paris the news of his slaying at the hands of Serbian terrorists in Sarajevo quickly passed from the front pages as the cities' own domestic dramas reigned. Yet five weeks later, Europe was destroying itself in a continental conflagration, fueled—McMeekin writes—by diplomatic confusion, conniving, laziness and myopia.

Cut through the thicket of names, and the tragedy unfolds with the pace of a thriller. "McMeekin's chronicle of these weeks in July 1914: Countdown to War is almost impossible to put down," the New York Review of Books wrote earlier this year, leading off a review of six books on World War I, occasioned by the pending centennial of the war's outbreak.

But McMeekin, '96, an assistant professor of history at Koç University in Istanbul, hasn't just assembled old facts into a page-turner timed for the anniversary. He's drawn on new evidence researched from international archives to dispute the prevailing wisdom that Germany, above all, deserves blame for turning crisis into war.

In McMeekin's telling, the French and particularly the Imperial Russians, in their haste to mobilize, did as much as anyone to push matters beyond the brink. It's a twist on orthodoxy the London Review of Books called a "tight and bracingly revisionist analysis of how the crisis unfolded." Or, as McMeekin puts it: "I'm complicating the story. I'm making it clear you can't simply blame the whole thing on the Germans."

For Americans, who fought a shorter, less deadly version of the war much farther from home, it can be hard to appreciate how such new interpretations still jangle nerves a century on. But recently, when a leader in Britain's Labour Party cited McMeekin in a call for a more nuanced understanding of the war's beginning, London's Tory mayor denounced it as "total twaddle" and grounds for the politician's resignation.

Going against the grain comes naturally to McMeekin. He has a contrarian's love for the counternarrative and a detective's nose for it, says Margaret L. Anderson, professor emerita of history at UC-Berkeley, where she was McMeekin's doctoral director. Some historians finish their dissertations swearing they'll never delve into archives again, but there's nowhere else he'd rather be.

And the fruit of his digging has marked him as a rising talent, Anderson says. July 1914 is his fifth book in a decade, a pace of production that would test a pulp writer, let alone someone covering new ground with deeply sourced, prizewinning histories. "Five books since 2003—I don't know anybody that has done that except people who do potboilers that aren't worth reading," she says.

McMeekin's emergence as an international historian would probably be no surprise to those who knew him in his youth, near Rochester, N.Y. At age 15, he fell in love with the subject publicly, playing Winston Churchill in a reenactment of the Yalta Conference. Two years later, he took on the role of Joseph McCarthy in an "even more outlandish reenactment of the Army-McCarthy hearings." His senior year and the following summer, he did field research on Russian émigrés under a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

He chose Stanford not so much because his parents—Thomas McMeekin, '67, and Susan McMeekin Davis, '67—are alums, but because he judged the history department superior to Harvard's. And while he pursued other interests on the Farm, including acting in several plays, he wasted no time establishing his priority.

James Sheehan, Stanford professor emeritus of modern European history and Anderson's husband, remembers a young McMeekin writing to acclaimed Harvard political scientist Stanley Hoffman to disagree with something he had written, setting off a scholarly debate in which the professor took the student quite seriously. "Not something your average freshman is apt to do," Sheehan recalls. "From very early on, Sean was someone who set himself apart."

But if McMeekin's calling as a historian was a given, his actual path in the field would have been hard to predict. At Stanford he focused on the French Revolution, picking up the language by studying in Paris and buttressing his skills with German. At Cal he switched time and place, enticed in part by the lure of the former Soviet Union's recently opened archives. No matter that he didn't speak Russian; he was soon taking intensive lessons.

In 2002, his Russian expertise landed him in Turkey. And it's there, far from the fields of France and Belgium that conjure the war for many, that the First World War really came alive for him.

To many Europeans, he says, World War I now seems like a closed chapter, the dark consequence of a set of conditions shunted to history by the creation of the European Union and its antecedents. In the Middle East, though, where borders drawn in the war's aftermath are at the heart of the turmoil in places like Iraq and Syria, and where suspicions linger about the European powers' motives in starting the war, the embers smolder on: "It's more of an open wound," he says.

Intrigued by the fresh perspective, and tapping his fledgling skill in Ottoman Turkish, McMeekin wrote The Berlin-Baghdad Express, which explored Germany's attempt to exploit jihad in the Middle East to foment revolt against the British during the war. A year later came The Russian Origins of the First World War, in which he posited Russia's unrecognized role in starting the war, one motivated in part by its designs to carve up the Ottoman Empire on its southwestern flank.

"I think he proved to be quite convincing," Anderson says. "It was an argument whose time has come."

McMeekin says other historians sometimes ask him about his prolific work rate. Part of it is falling in love with the subject, he says. Part is having more time as an academic in Turkey, where his teaching and administrative loads are lighter than they might be in the States. And part of it, he says, is a variation of the old quip that 90 percent of success is just showing up.

"I do feel a lot of authors would be a lot more successful if they just sat down to write," he says. "A lot of it is just doing the work."

McMeekin now finds himself with new challenges to keep his pen moving, as he and his wife, Nesrin, have two young children. But he hardly has time to slow down: He's already under contract for two more books.

Photo: Courtesy Basic Books. Excerpted with permission from July 1914: Countdown to War by Sean McKeekin. Available from Basic Books. A member of the Perseus Books Group Copyright 2013.

From July 1914:

The Germans...went into the war expecting that they would lose, which is why they were so keen to wiggle out of it at the last moment. [German Army Chief of Staff Helmuth] Moltke's unrealistic and ultimately suicidal war plan, involving a march across Belgium, reflected German weakness, not German strength. It is not hard to see why Sir Edward Grey was able to convince the Commons (or most of it, anyway) that Germany was the aggressor in 1914: she was indeed the Power that first violated neutral territory in Luxembourg and then in Belgium. She did so, however, out of desperation, out of Moltke's belief that only a knockout blow against France would give her the slightest chance of winning. So far from "willing the war," the Germans went into it kicking and screaming as the Austrian noose snapped shut around their necks.

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Sam Scott is a senior writer at Stanford.

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