SOURCE: “Was the Great War Necessary?,” in Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 283, No. 5, May, 1999, pp. 118-20, 122-8.

In the following review, Schwartz provides an extended analysis of The Pity of War, citing weaknesses in Ferguson's “impassioned and distorted argument.”

Americans scarcely marked the eightieth Armistice Day, this past November 11. But standing with stricken faces before the Cenotaph at Whitehall and the Ossuaire at Verdun, and tolling bells in the gloomy villages of Lancashire and the Pas-de-Calais, the British and the French, our erstwhile co-belligerents, mourned as if freshly wounded. For them the Great War is not yet merely history.

In this way, among others, the Oxford historian Niall Ferguson’s The Pity of War is a very British book. Although Ferguson is young, clever, and ironic, there is nothing cool or dispassionate about his view of the war. The underlying and animating emotion in his book is profound regret. “The...