Light Relief

Niall Ferguson's The War of the World is an excellent read, but deeply depressing. I'm at the two-thirds mark and I need to put it behind me as I'm spending too much time away from the book thinking about the darn book, or rather the material with which it deals.

The saving grace in all this is the occasional moment of humour. Sometimes these derive from Ferguson's wry commentary; sometimes from the deep ironies inherent in his various subjects. A segment on Nazi commanders in occupied Poland trying to sub-divide the population into a coherent variety of racial groups is worthy of Beckett at his most extreme. In fact, you come to realise why Beckett is not actually extreme in any sense. Unfortunately the laughter dies in your throat when Ferguson makes it all dreadfully real by giving the names and backgrounds of specific victims of the madness.

And then there's the hilarious account of paranoid old Joe Stalin managing to trust the most egregious, and, let's face it, obvious liar of the twentieth century when everybody and their grandfather seemed to know almost to the day when Hitler intended to invade the Soviet Union. Though, I must say, the fact that there are plenty of folk around in today's Russia who credit Uncle Joe with saving his nation at the time in question surely evinces more than a single horrified chuckle.

Ferguson reckons that if Chamberlain had stood up to Herr Hitler in 1938 it would have been game over for the Third Reich, and I'm very much inclined to agree. The thesis certainly dovetails with Kershaw's account of the nothingman. The younger me had some sympathy for the appeasers, believing that hindsight made it too easy to severely judge those caught up in trying to deal with the situation in Europe as it unfolded in the late-thirties. Now I'm not so sure. I think I would have recognised Hitler for what he was, a classic bully. And I know exactly how to deal with bullies. You make it clear that under no circumstances are they going to work their power on you - and they don't.