THE BIG ONE.

The last century, through its great cataclysms, offers two clear, ringing, and, unfortunately, contradictory lessons. The First World War teaches that territorial compromise is better than full-scale war, that an "honor-bound" allegiance of the great powers to small nations is a recipe for mass killing, and that it is crazy to let the blind mechanism of armies and alliances trump common sense. The Second teaches that searching for an accommodation with tyranny by selling out small nations only encourages the tyrant, that refusing to fight now leads to a worse fight later on, and that only the steadfast rejection of compromise can prevent the natural tendency to rush to a bad peace with worse men. The First teaches us never to rush into a fight, the Second never to back down from a bully.

These two lessons are taught less as morals than as collective memory: the lore of the Second World War remains on the whole heroic, while the imagery of the First, which was fought by the same armies and even, on occasion, the same men, remains that of utter waste. (Compare Steven Spielberg's "Saving Private Ryan" and Peter Weir's "Gallipoli," both accounts of Churchillian invasions.) Every time a Western politician with any historical sense faces a crisis, he has to decide whether he should back down and search for whatever compromise he can find, for fear of repeating 1914, or step up and slug somebody, for fear of repeating 1939. John Kennedy, at the time of the Cuban missile crisis, had Barbara Tuchman's "The Guns of August" as a warning at his bedside, but he also had his generals around him muttering about Munich.

Yet, with the coming of the new century, and the ninetieth anniversary of the beginning of the Great War, it seems, at last, a thing that took place long ago. While waves of revisionism and refinement have come and gone, something larger is at work now, and that is a tendency to view the war not as the end of everything but as just one more thing that happened. This publishing season brings us an exceptional round of new books on the subject, and it is possible to scent the first cool injections of historical embalming fluid at the edges of their pages. David Fromkin's "Europe's Last Summer" (Knopf; $26.95) offers revisionism of a kind already familiar to academic historians, placing the blame for the war not only on the interna-tional system but, especially, on a couple of nasty German soldier-statesmen. David Stevenson's "Cataclysm: The First World War as Political Tragedy" (Basic; $35), perhaps the best comprehensive one-volume history of the war yet written, implicates the politicians on all sides, who started it and kept it going. There are also more specialized works, most notably "The Kaiser's Army" (Oxford; $40), by Eric Dorn Brose, which sharply quizzes the idea of a monolithic German militarism of the sort that Fromkin proposes.

But the season, and the war, belongs to Hew Strachan, a professor at All Souls College, Oxford, who has published three books on the Great War in the past four years. Strachan is preparing a definitive, three-volume history of the war, and, though only the first volume, "The First World War: To Arms" (Oxford; $24.95), has been completed, he has now condensed his research into a single-volume history, "The First World War" (Viking; $27.95)--thereby giving us, with a slightly Borgesian note, the popular synopsis of a trilogy of books that does not, as yet, actually exist.

What Strachan offers is history as only the professionals can do it, and rarely enough even then. Every intricacy, political, military, and diplomatic, of the conflict is open for inspection: if you are curious about, say, the failed German effort to subvert British India by way of hidden subsidies to a small San Francisco-based Indian-nationalist movement, this is the place to find out about it. But Strachan is no drudge; he has a point to make and a message to deliver. His desire is to take the cliche image of the war, particularly the English one--the war as Monty Python massacre, with idiot Graham Chapman generals sending gormless Michael Palin soldiers to a senseless death--and replace it with something more like the image that Americans have of our Civil War: a horrible, hard slog, certainly, but fought that way because no other was available, and fought for a cause in itself essentially good.

This is a challenge to conventional thinking about the Great War which cannot be circumscribed by the usual left-right, hard-soft categories. The last military history of comparable intelligence and ambition, after all, came, only five years ago, from the matchlessly vivid pen of John Keegan, who, with remarkable ferocity, drew an opposite lesson. Keegan, a man of the right not readily critical of military men or methods, began his 1999 history, "The First World War" (Knopf; $35), with the declaration that the war was "a tragic and unnecessary conflict" that "destroyed the benevolent and optimistic culture of the European continent"--a meaningless disaster, from which all the subsequent disasters of the century descend. The recent reading list is also haunted by the conservative Niall Ferguson's fine, aggressively revisionist history "The Pity of War," which grieves over the war less as a disaster of imperialism than as a disaster for imperialism. The war, for Ferguson, was a catastrophe because overrating the German threat prevented British imperialism from ...