Because of the critical commotion aroused by Christopher Nolan’s adaptation of the Odyssey, I’m re-reading the Homer, a book a day, in Richmond Lattimore’s translation. The pleasure it brings is very great, not least because I’m an old man, and far less likely than I used to be to respond to the hero’s sufferings with unsympathetic impatience.

Otherwise, I am reading a clutch of books about the years before the Great War. Two of them, Christopher Clark’s The Sleepwalkers and Robert K Massie’s Dreadnought, tell the epic story of the “run-up” to the Great War. I’ve read each of these books once before. There might seem to be a salt-and-pepper complementarity to their perspectives, the one land-locked and the other water-borne, but what both are really about is  fear, diplomacy, and personality.

I don’t know how often I’ve read George Dangerfield’s The Strange Death of Liberal England  — two or three times.  Dangerfield’s very plausible thesis is that Great Britain would have imploded had it not been for the distracting emergency of the Great War. It’s very entertaining; perhaps a bit too entertaining — Dangerfield’s arch laughter at the blind conceit of the pooh-bahs in charge can be intrusive.

The one book in the group that’s new to me, Nancy W Ellenberger’s Balfour’s World, is concerned with the lives of five posh young people who were close to the somewhat older Arthur Balfour, and not with the Great War much at all; although, in this company, the war lurks like a ghost from the future.

There is so much detail in the story that leads up to the pointless catastrophe of 1914 that, if I don’t actually learn something on every page of these books, I certainly do see things more clearly, and my thinking becomes a little more articulate. Racism, for example, is more of an issue that I’d thought. Of course, everybody knows about the contempt of the English and the Germans for all the other peoples of the world — most keenly, for those nearby, the Slavs to the East and the Latins to the South — but their conviction that the two of them sprang from the same superior stock led not to cooperation but bitter disappointment, with each feeling let down by the other. Kaiser Wilhelm, eldest grandson of Queen Victoria, embodied the problem in his own peculiar person. He seemed to believe that the enviable English needed a dash of Prussian discipline to become gods on earth — and that Germans needed to take up sailing. It is hard to believe that anyone so ridiculous ruled a major power for so long.

To the extent, slight in my view, that the Great War had “causes,” I can see two. In the East, Russia and Austria were confronted — tempted — by the problem of the withdrawal (or eviction) of the Ottomans from the Balkans. In the West, Britain, France and Germany, notwithstanding their polite, bourgeois manners at home, all had secondary identities as competing mercantile empires, and all were troubled by the conflict between cherished ideals and the brutality of conquest. These uncertainties, either about what to do or how to reconcile what they were doing with self-image, destabilized the diplomatic climate and resulted in a communications breakdown. There was also more than a whiff of Looking For Trouble in British and German worries about Russian commercial expansion in the Far East.

I have a crank theory, too, of course: the Great War was the swan song of European aristocrats, who, far from having been swept away by the downfall of the ancien régime in France a century earlier, continued to run armies everywhere, and to dazzle the new millionaires with their prestige. Hereditary nobility completely rejected the idea that, politically, they were no better than their footmen, but instead of head-on confrontation, they undermined democracy by exploiting the new media — the “popular press.” There was nothing concerted about this strategy. For all the fine things that could be said about artistocrats, the sad fact is that, somewhat like spiders, their personal opportunism was far more reliable than their class collegiality.

Working in parallel, then, they reduced Europe to a barnyard of Chicken Littles, and their paranoia reeked of lust. They dragged their nations to war because what else, after all, does a warrior class do? (Even in America: It is no surprise to discover that Alfred Thayer Mahan, author of the 1890 best-seller, The Influence of Sea Power Upon History, was not only a collateral descendent of John Jay, but born at West Point to boot.) It was as if Europe became too civilized after the Franco-Prussian War (1870-1) to fight for a reason, was induced to go to war over nothing more substantial than the fear of war. The murk of poor judgments and misunderstandings only partially obscured an orgy of insane pre-emption.

Interestingly, rather early on in The Sleepwalkers, Christopher Clark dismisses — or seems to dismiss — Robert Massie’s Mahan-based thesis in a few paragraphs. In the end, he argues, the naval arms race wasn’t that significant. Germany abandoned it before the War, and for all the notorious trench warfare on the Western Front, there was only one significant naval battle — and the significance of it was that battleships were too expensive to deploy in earnest. (Talk about sunk costs!) I would reply that the ongoing one-upmanship in shipbuilding was like a gas leak that, building up over fifteen years or so, easily augmented the spark of Sarajevo to volcanic effect. Of the two books, I would choose The Sleepwalkers if I could have only one, but on the understanding that Clark works too hard to straighten the very crooked timber of the personalities behind the war. Massie populates his stage with characters of Shakespearean deformity.

With its focus on personal development, particularly that of women, among patrician Britons, Balfour’s World is not notably warlike, but four out of the six portraits are of people at or near the top of the British political establishment. Balfour was of course Prime Minister from 1902 t0 1905, having been an active understudy for his ailing uncle, the Earl of Salisbury, for several years, and Margot Tennant, who was certainly drawn to Balfour (whose attentions were devoted to Mary Elcho), wound up marrying his Liberal successor (HH Asquith). Mary Elcho’s brother, George Wyndham, was a grand fulminator against Irish Home Rule, and as such a loudly destabilizing voice. He was also one of the few grandees one reads about in these pages whose families paid the price of the War. George’s son, “Perf,” died a year after his father, in the Battle of the Aisne.

This is not a tale for our times, if only because almost everybody believed, quite sincerely, that, when the conflict broke, it would end quickly.