A Scrap of Paper poses a forceful challenge to scholars (as well as to contemporary politicians and journalists) who have characterized World War I as a senseless slaughter among equally culpable states unguided by high principles. Building on the themes of her last book, Absolute Destruction: Military Culture and the Practices of War in Imperial Germany (2004), in which she documented the domestic and international repercussions of Wilhelmine Germany's unfettered military institutions, Isabel Hull now indicts the Second Reich's conduct in World War I for violating almost a century of international legal norms and engaging in uncivilized behavior—while claiming that its enemies continued to respect treaties and agreements. Confining herself to the Western front—and thereby omitting other battlefields that provide a broader picture of wartime conduct—Hull frames her argument around six core issues: the German attack on Belgium, the treatment of occupied populations, the British blockade, unrestricted submarine warfare, the introduction of new military weapons, and the use of reprisals by both sides against prisoners of war and through aerial bombardment.

Beginning with her prologue, “What We Have Forgotten,” Hull—who has done an impressive amount of research in German, French, British, and U.S. archives—aims to reinsert the dimension of law into our understanding of World War I. This “erasure” (3), she maintains, was a result of the German government's massive and largely successful “innocence campaign” (12) after 1919, which reinforced the backlash among the Allies and neutrals against the Entente's heavy-handed wartime propaganda and their misgivings over the imperfect Paris Peace treaties. Moreover, Hull contends that in their assessment of Germany's behavior in World War I, historians and political scientists have long tended to devalue legal rhetoric, uphold expansive claims of state sovereignty, and favor realist views. One exception was the East German historian Ernst Stenzel, whose 1973 monograph Die Kriegführung des deutschen Imperialismus und das Völkerrecht acknowledged Imperial Germany's numerous violations of international law.

Hull's overarching theme is that the British and French—unlike the Germans—put international law at the center of their military decisions and peacemaking efforts, and that a German triumph would have meant the triumph of “law-obliterating” (27) principles. Hull begins with Berlin's violation of the 1839 treaty guaranteeing Belgian neutrality (long-anticipated by the Schlieffen Plan), which was publicly dismissed by Chancellor Theobald von Bethmann-Hollweg as a mere “scrap of paper.” This supposedly reflected the Reich government's capacious view of military necessity. Hull also revisits the century-long debate over Britain's entry into the war and maintains that the defense of international law was the central motivation for the British decision.

Drawing on her previous research, Hull provides a detailed treatment of Germany's mistreatment of the civilian populations of Belgium and eastern France, which involved the violation of several international conventions. Dismissing the Reich's excuse of “military necessity,” she believes that this behavior had been “long preprogrammed” (81) by the country‘s engrained military culture and by its leaders’ persistent opposition to international rules. Hull also discusses elements of Britain's “blockade” that, because of “unforeseen circumstances” (192), violated previous international engagements; she maintains, however, that “Britain took law enormously seriously, even when it was breaking it” (194)—adding that its “self-image as law-abiding and as a leader of the world community of ‘civilized states’ cannot be overemphasized in understanding its devotion to the law for its own sake” (200). Germany, by contrast, “was fundamentally different” in viewing “law as a factor in policy … not just in its substance but more important in how law worked, and in its importance for its own sake” (211). Hull locates this difference in Germany's decisions to wage unrestricted submarine warfare against neutral commercial and passenger vessels, to drop incendiary bombs from its zeppelins to terrorize civilian populations, and to use poison gas and flamethrowers against enemy soldiers in World War I—thus developing what Hull terms a “weapons positivism” (269) that undercut existing agreements and created a “law-free zone” (267) that the victors sought to repair after 1919. In the final section, “Reprisals: Prisoners of War and Allied Aerial Bombardment,” Hull again finds the Entente more conscious of their moral and legal obligations than the Germans were.

A brief summary cannot do justice to Hull's meticulously documented narrative, which not only provides considerable detail about the internal and international debates over legal standards for combat during World War I but also measures them against actual practices. The writing is clear, often eloquent, and occasionally pithy; the examples are carefully chosen and vivid. This reader is nevertheless left with three reservations. One involves balance: in Hull's depiction, German military and civilian critics of the Reich's wartime practices are cited as evidence of a weak and ineffective domestic opposition, whereas those in the Allied camp who objected to their governments’ derelictions are praised as defenders of international law. Second, there is arguably an excessive use of post-World War I memoirs—among them ones by H.H. Asquith, Henri Poincaré, Bogdan von Hutton-Czapski, and Theodor Wolf, published respectively in 1928, 1929, 1936, and 1984—to document the illegal actions of the combatants. Finally, there is the book's narrow compass: by focusing on German policies and Allied responses on the Western front and on the high seas—without comparative references to the other fronts (i.e., the East, the Balkans, the Alps, the Caucasus, as well as Africa and Asia) or to the Allies’ treatment of their own colonial subjects on all these fronts—Hull misses an opportunity to enlarge our understanding of how international law, both the violations as well as its observance, affected the entire course of World War I and its aftermath.