Secret Warriors:The Spies, Scientists, and Code-Breakers of World War Iby Taylor DowningPegasus Books, 20152014 saw a glut of books about the First World War, by way of observing (and cashing in on) the hundredth anniversary of the war's beginning. Books poured off the presses, covering dozens of aspects of the war, from overviews of major battles to assessments of major political and military figures to studies of kings and kingdoms. And now, with 2015 well under way and the anniversary's shot and incident dying down just a bit, along comes an utterly fascinating addition to the shelf: Taylor Downing's Secret Warriors, which defies the custom of the sub-genre and tends to stay away from big battle set-pieces and flamboyant figures such as Lloyd George or the Kaiser in favor of shining a spotlight on dozens of men who are usually relegated to footnotes. He wants to tell the story of the “engineers, chemists, physicists, doctors, psychologists, mathematicians, intelligence gatherers, and propagandists” who were every bit as vital to the prosecution of the war as were the boys with fixed bayonets, and he knows perfectly well the ideological entrenched position he's facing:

The First World War is often seen exclusively as a war fought by armies of millions living in the subterranean world of the trenches, slogging it out in human wave assaults and being slaughtered in dreadful numbers … The role usually given to science in the First World War is that all it did was to introduce ghastly new inventions to the arsenal of war, including powerful new high explosives and hideous clouds of poisons gas.

Downing wants to correct this idea that the science of the First World War was simply diabolical – that it was, basically, the domain of the machine gun, the gas canister, and the newly-created armored tank. “This brutal industrial-scientific war, conducted by means of the long-range artillery shell, the machine gun and the newly-formulated chemical weapons, it is argued, led to killing on a vast, appalling, unprecedented scale,” he writes. “In many histories of the war, the contribution goes no further than this. It was seen as murderous, destructive, and entirely negative.”In order to show the nascent sciences of the time in a more favorable light, Downing takes the surest approach: he puts human faces on all of it. Among its many other winning qualities, Secret Warriors is basically a gallery of enormously engaging biographical studies of the menwho fought the war not on the battlefield but in the laboratory, or on the testing-ground, or in the newsroom – or in the clinic, as in the case of plastic surgeon Harold Gillies, whose facial reconstruction work on wounded soldiers is nothing short of incredible. Or Eustace Tennyson d'Eyncourt, who developed the tank at Winston Churchill's insistence. Or Charles Rolls, the visionary motor-maker who tried to interest the British army in the new invention of powered flight. Or William Lawrence Bragg, the X-ray specialist who later remembered the war years as “a glorious time when we worked far into every night with new worlds unfolding before us in the silent laboratory” (at 25, Bragg was and still is the youngest person ever to win a Nobel Prize). Or best-selling novelist John Buchan, who turned his writing abilities to wartime propaganda.In addition to giving his readers lovingly-detailed pen-portraits of these and dozens of other “secret warriors,” Downing is also careful to remember how radically different attitudes toward technology were in 1915 from what they are a century later. Can anyone familiar with the vast present-day U.S drone program, for instance, read a passage like this one without wincing:

It seems incredible now, when the use of aerial imagery is so widespread, that the army should have been reluctant to take it up. But some officers thought there was something 'unfair' or 'ungentlemanly' about photographing the enemy behind his lines. [Photographic pioneer John Moore-]Brabazon noticed that officers always wanted to 'play by the rules', feeling that the use of such photography to expose what one's opponent was up to seemed to 'invade the privacy that has always been accorded to the enemy.'

Downing rightly points out that in the century born on the battlefields of the First World War, it would be science as much as anything else that would so radically transform the Western world and usher in our modern era. Watching how so many branches of those new sciences were born in the breach, groped-for out of necessity in the face of indifferent funding and the prospect of illicit use, is endlessly captivating – and Downing's lively storytelling abilities don't hurt matters any.