It… might be, but if I recall correctly it was a short enough story to ensure the setting was barely mentioned.

I really wish I could recall the title or author, but every time I try to the brain thinks “Ray Bradbury! Orson Scott Card!” and can’t get past those two folks. Also mixed in the muddled memory: a science fiction story “________ for Thunder” and a story about people who get an extra year of life if they kill someone with a blue-painted hand. (Sigh.)

I could be very wrong, but if memory serves, the views on the possibility of protracted bloody warfare held by the German military was based on the fact that they had sent more military observers to the American Civil War than any other nation and covered it pretty much top to bottom.

It wasn’t a story set in the Irish civil war, was it? Sounds very familiar to me.

Let us hear no more about “Innocent Belgians”, bah, it makes me sick.

Thanks for the refs, I’ll look into it. If I can.

May I take a moment to say how extremely annoying, self-defeating, and contrary to the spirit of the scholarly enterprise I find the paywalls around academic publication? Thank you.

Back to your argument. Accepting for the moment that it is true (which is not implausible on the face of it, IMHO), the question becomes why did it do no good?

That is, it strikes me as plausible that in 1914 the German General Staff had a better grasp of the coming realities than either (a) their equivalents in other countries, or (b) their political leaders. Why did their understanding have no effect on what Germany actually did? Was this process similar to what the US military has done for the past 8 years, including e.g. Powell’s work to undermine the Powell Doctrine.

It seems to be an enduring character of many militarists to see the world as their movie with them as the stars. A movie in which the death of “extras” is of no concern.

Agreed, though this attitude is much, much older than the movies.

It seems to be an enduring character of many militarists to see the world as their movie with them as the stars. A movie in which the death of “extras” is of no concern. Henry Kissinger and Dick Cheney come to mind as contemporary examples. Tangentially, I’ve never quite managed to assess the factor of so many heads of state in WWI being related by blood or marriage. Family feud?

Kitchener is the only exception who comes to mind, and he wasn’t “in power” in August 1914.

Against cabinet opinion, Kitchener correctly predicted a long war that would last at least three years, require huge new armies to defeat Germany, and suffer huge casualties before the end would come. Kitchener stated that the conflict would plumb the depths of manpower “to the last million.”

By “everyone” I meant “everyone in power”—do you know of exceptions? I also have the impression that the bulk of the various populations were pro-war in August 1914, though I’m much less certain about this.

Primary sources for the summer of 1939 have a mood of slipping toward a horrible cliff-edge. Primary sources for the summer of 1914 emphasize the exceptionally lovely weather—indeed, I have seen it suggested (… somewhere) that the beautiful weather was one of the contributing factors for the war, because it made people more willing to gather in large crowds, and more optimistic about their own abilities.

“He wept, but he took,” as Frederick said of Maria Theresa.

I seem to recall that Bismarck’s supposed opposition is largely a creation of his memoirs, but I will have to check on that.

Re: Galbraith: wowzers.

Doesn’t make much difference to the non-disclosure thing, but just in case anybody was thinking of sending him begging letters.

And Zaharoff was probably most influential as the origin of the interwar notion of blaming the prevalence of wars on the Merchants of Death at Vickers and Krupp, which I always thought was a pointless distraction from the actual forces explored in the posts above.