If you’ve been in the armed forces, I want you to think back to what you and your comrades were like a few weeks into your initial training.  You’ve got some skills, but they’re fresh, shallow, and untested.  You’ve got a lot of enthusiasm, but no experience.  If you’re lucky, you have leadership that’s at least been there and done that.

Now, imagine that one morning you get up, get on a train, and head off.  You’re with friends, some of whom you’ve known all your life. The mood is almost joyous.  This is it!  This is what your weeks of training were for!  You’re off on the adventure of a lifetime.  You get to where you’re going, form up into ranks, and head off.  As you go, you can hear machine guns and artillery ahead of you, but then someone starts singing “Yankee Doodle” or “America the Beautiful”*.  The singing becomes a chorus as the entire unit, then the units on your right and left take up the tune.  Yeah, you’re a little scared, but you’re surrounded by friends, both old and new, and you know that if you stick together, everyone will be OK.  By the time you get to the battle, you’re all cheering and waving your guns in the air.

Then you get in range of the enemy.

Contrary to your training, staying close together and marching straight ahead is getting your friends killed.  Holes are rent in the ranks as machine gunners and the artillery spotters get their range.  Soon, your unit, newly formed from fresh faces that you’ve known all your life, is separated into the quick and the dead, and there are a lot of dead.

By the time this is all over, those that aren’t dead or broken beyond repair are well on their way to being hardened veterans

Just imagine that for a moment.

Now you know what happened when the German leadership threw what they considered their reserves, mostly half-trained recruits and ill-trained reserves, into the First Battle of Ypres.  The Germans sacrificed an entire cohort of recruits and reserves to keep the British and French from turning their strategic flank.

Now, let’s flip that to the other side.  You veterans out there, imagine the professionals you knew in the military.  Like the American, British, and other western armies of today, the British army of 1914 was made up of a generation of skilled, blooded, and professional soldiers.  After Ypres, that army was shattered.

The BEF incurred 56,000 casualties at Ypres, of which 8,000 were dead and almost 18,000 were missing.  Also, consider that while the rest were wounded, a pretty good percentage of those probably never returned to the front.  Remember that their strength at the beginning of the war was a maximum of about 125,000 men, and they had already fought through the meat grinder of the first three months of the war.  In a battle that lasted about a month, they lost almost half their combat strength, and they had already been bloodied at places like Mons, the Marne, and the Aisne.

At its peak, the U.S. Army had about 180,000 soldiers in Iraq. Imagine that in the space of a few months of fighting, that force had lost almost all of its fighting capacity.  Imagine that at Fallujah alone we had lost almost 60,000 soldiers and Marines. Imagine the experience and skills that would have been lost, not only to the fighting force, but also to our ability to lead and train the next generation.  What impact do you think that would have on our ability to fight and to our casualty numbers while their replacements are coming up to speed?

The First Battle of Ypres closed the front to maneuver warfare.  At a terrible cost, the British and French had succeeded in stopping the German juggernaut, rolling it back in places, and keeping it from attacking again.  The Germans had paid an equally horrible butchers bill to take some land and keep the Entente Forces from pushing them away from what they had gained.

What they had all gained was a form of warfare that few, if any, of them knew how to fight. The next four years would be drenched in blood as the British and French tried to push the Germans back across the Rhein, and the Germans tried to hold onto their conquests.

The “Race to the Sea” was over. Now, the real killing would begin.

*Insert patriotic song of your distinct flavor here

In October, 1914, the Germans made the first of several attempts to take Warsaw, in what is today Poland.  The Russians had taken a defeat at Tannenberg, but had been able to soundly defeat the Austrians in Galicia.  In order to keep the Russians from exploiting their gains to the south and east, the Germans pushed two armies forward.

The clash between the combined German and Austrian forces and the Russian army pushed the Russians back almost to Warsaw.  The Germans got to the Vistula, but were forced back, and had returned to their original positions by the end of October.

Russia had taken what would have been a mortal blow to many other nations at Tannenberg and the Masurian Lakes.  It had been able to shove the Austrians back, however, and even after being attacked by superior German forces in front of Warsaw, were able to push them back as well.  The Eastern Front was one of more movement than the Western, but the situation was very much the same:  massive attacks against enemies, followed by counter-attacks, then a return to the status quo.

What we can learn from this is that so long as someone has the means to resist, they can still be in the fight.  Russia, by the standards of earlier wars, had no business in continuing the fight, but she kept at it.  Being able to soak up damage and then dish it out kept all of the powers in the Great War going for years.

After finding and exploiting a gap in the German lines at the Marne, the British and French armies pursued their adversaries as quickly as the armies could march.  The Germans fell back to close the gap and keep the Entente forces from being able to either turn into the flank of their troops or get loose in their rear areas.

The Germans stopped retreating when they reached the Aisne River.  There, the ground rises into steep cliffs at the Chemin des Dames, with good fields of observation and fire.  The Germans took advantage of this terrain to create a belt of trenches and strongpoints.  This is where they would stand and fight to keep what they had gained in Belgium and France.

The British and French threw themselves at these emplacements, but no matter how motivated and courageous the troops were, they could not overcome concentrated machine guns and artillery on higher ground and behind entrenched infantry.  The lesson the Germans learned at Liege was taught to the Entente forces, and they were unable to dislodge the Germans.

After losing thousands of men with nothing to show for it, the Entente dug in opposite the Germans.  This began the hardening of the Western Front into a continuous line of trenches that would eventually run from the Belgian seacoast to the Swiss border.  In a battle of movement, there are times when the combatants cannot get at each other, and casualty rates will drop for a time. In trench warfare, the combatants are always within range of one another, and no such reprieve is possible.

In order to not repeat the mistake of frontal attacks against entrenched enemy troops, both the Germans and the Entente powers tried fruitlessly to turn the flank of the other.  In this “Race to the Sea”, a German move would be thwarted by a British or French maneuver, or vice verse, with both armies slipping continuously to the northeast until they finally ran out of land.  Once their sleeves were brushing the sea, the war of movement ended, and the stalemate of trench warfare, and the daily grinding down of armies, began.

The resulting line of siege works kept the belligerents at each others throats for years, and left no alternative but frontal assault for commanders.  This was a style of war that neither side was trained or equipped for, and the on-the-job training that both troops and commanders went through took a horrendous toll in blood.

On September 5, 1914, after retreating for hundreds of miles, the British Expeditionary Force and the French Army turned and attacked the advancing German army.  The Germans had marched through Belgium and swept the British and the French before them.  They were pretty close to the end of their rope at that point, but their goals of surrounding their opponents and even taking Paris were tantalizingly close. Instead, the Germans drifted apart at a critical juncture between two armies, and the Entente forces, as Churchill said, “probed its way into the German liver”.  The Entente counterattacked along the Marne, and all hopes for German victory were lost.  After the battle, in which the French threw everything they had into turning the Germans back, or at least stopping them short of Paris, the Germans retreated back to what became the static front line that is the principle symbol of the war.

So what happened?  The Germans seemed to have the war in the bag, and then a miracle happened for the British and French.  One day the BEF was making plans to withdraw back to England, and a week later they’ve got the Germans on the run back to the Aisne.

Looking at the sources, there are a lot of opinions as to what caused the Germans to get caught in a bad position and forced to retreat.  Like a lot of situations, I believe it was a lot of different factors that led to the Allied victory at the Marne.  A lot of them boil down to the German’s not following their overall war strategy, the Schlieffen Plan.

First, Von Kluck’s forces were brought much further inland than the original plan called for (“letting the last man on the right, brush the Channel with his sleeve”).  If he had taken his drive further west, he would have easily outflanked the BEF and would not have had to fight as hard as he did to get within sight of Paris.

Second, the Germans counterattacked against French forces in the south-east portion of the Western Front.  Here, the French had attacked into Alsace-Lorraine and beyond, and after a few days were strung out and vulnerable.  The Germans took advantage of this, and drove them back.  However, the tactical victory contributed to a strategic defeat.  The French armies’ retreat back into France shortened both their supply lines and made units available for the French commander, Joffre, to use as he needed them in other parts of the front.  If the French had been allowed to continue their advance, even into Germany herself, those forces would not have been available to stem the flow of Germans in from Belgium, would have required supplies that the French needed to defend Paris, and would have been an easy fruit to either pluck or let wither on the vine after French collapse.

Finally, and this is debatable as to whether it mattered or not, the forces in the west were reduced by a small amount to provide unneeded reinforcements on the Eastern Front.  It was only a few corps that would have been in reserve, but I believe that had they been allowed to stay with their original war assignments, they could have relieved some of the worn-down German units that were pushed back at the Marne.  That may have made a difference in the final equation.

Basically, the Germans took their eyes off of the prize.  The Schlieffen plan was a judo move involving millions of men.  If the French had been allowed to overextend themselves while von Kluck made a buttonhook to get around the left flank of the BEF and the French, it would have made it very difficult for the French to not sue for peace as they had 40 years earlier.  By changing the plan, violating its precepts, and weakening their striking force, the Germans opened themselves up for eventual defeat.  It is interesting that after the Marne, there is rarely any talk on the German side of winning the war on the Western Front in the same way as it was envisioned prior to the first bicyclist crossing into Belgium.

On August 23, 1914, two momentous battles were fought in Europe.

The first, at Mons, was the first big engagement for the British Expeditionary Force.  Britain hadn’t fought a major battle on the Continent since Waterloo, and this was a test of the training and doctrine of the past 100 years.  Small compared to the French and German armies, the BEF relied on discipline and skill to overcome numerical deficiencies.  Mons has become a legend in British military history, as stories of the battle highlight British marksmanship and discipline.  However, even had the French not retreated from their flanks, the BEF probably wouldn’t have been able to hold against the German onslaught.  The retreat from Mons continued for weeks, and only ended when the Germans turned in front of Paris, precipitating the Battle of the Marne.

The other battle was the titanic clash that has become known as Tannenberg.  In this engagement, the Russian Second Army and the German Eighth Army met in Prussian territory as part of a Russian stab into Germany.  German forces on the Eastern Front were only supposed to hold the Russians until the French and British were crushed, but due to superior generalship, superior reconnaissance and intelligence work, and infighting between the Russian commanders, the Germans were able to concentrate their forces against the Russians and defeat them in detail.  The German commanders, Hindenburg and Ludendorff, made their reputations at Tannenberg, and were effectively running Germany by the end of the war.  The commander of the Russian Second Army, Samsonov, was so ashamed of his performance at Tannenberg that he committed suicide rather than face capture or facing the Tsar.  After defeating the Russians at Tannenberg, the Germans attacked the Russian First Army at the Masurian Lakes.  This battle also ended in a Russian catastrophe, and set the tone for the entire war on the Eastern Front.  With some exceptions, the Russians always seemed to come up short in one critical part of the fight or another, and their continued incompetence and inability to win led, in large part, to the collapse of the Romanov dynasty and the Communist coup in 1917.

So, what are the lessons from these two battles?  From Mons, we should learn that no matter how excellent your army is, quantity has a quality all its own.  The Germans were well led and well equipped, and vastly outnumbered the BEF.  No matter how good the British soldiers and leaders were, they could not stand for long against the storm that was breaking across their front.

From Tannenberg, we can learn the opposite lesson.  With large numbers must also come expertise, at all levels.  The First and Second Armies were arguably the best formations that the Russians had, and they vastly outnumbered the Germans.  But incompetence on the part of their leadership, lack of discipline on the part of the soldiers, and failures to remember that the enemy rarely does as you think he will led to the destruction of both.  If you’re going to put together a large force, you have to make sure they are trained, equipped, and led well enough to win.

In other words, you can go too far either way.  A small, well-disciplined and led army can be overwhelmed, but a ponderous, massive army that is short on everything, especially leadership, can be easily cornered and dismembered.  Somewhere in the middle is the sweet spot of an army that is large enough to handle most opponents, but small enough that it can be led by mortals and equipped and trained without emptying the treasury.

100 years ago today, fighting began on the Western Front of World War I.  Belgium, a tiny country whose neutrality was guaranteed by all of the major European powers, was invaded by forces of the German empire.  German demands that Belgium allow its army to swing through its territory as part of the Schieffen Plan were rebuffed.  Belgian resistance to the invasion would bloody Germanies nose, and would be a forewarning of the carnage and stalemate to come.  The siege of Liege would be a microcosm of the war, with fortifications, entrenchments, machine guns, huge artillery pieces, and massive casualties.

Great Britain, who had been teetering on the knife-edge between neutrality and war with Germany, issued an ultimatum to Germany, demanding that her forces be removed from Belgium.  Germany was required to answer the ultimatum by 11 PM London time.  The German chancellor, Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg, is reported to have been outraged by this, calling the treaty that bound both the United Kingdom and Germany to Belgium’s neutrality a “scrap of paper”.  Where he seemed to fail in his understanding was that, while a treaty is indeed written on paper, it is made out of the honor of the nations that sign it, and it is backed by the power and the blood of those nations’ citizens.

The ultimatum lapsed without an adequate German reply, and the United Kingdom went to war against Germany and her allies on August 4.  The rest of the major powers would complete their declarations of war in the following days, and the Battle of the Frontiers, the first great battle of the Western Front, would commence on August 7.

Sir Edward Grey, the British Foreign Minister, is believed to have said “The lamps are going out all over Europe, and we shall not see them lit again in our lifetime.”, and his words were remarkably prophetic.   Peace on the European continent has been a fleeting dream and memory for a century.  Our hopes for peace in Europe after a century of warfare and the fall of Communism, were dashed by sectarian violence in the Balkans.  Europe, even with the unity of the European Union, is still beset with violence and tensions.  The destruction of the old world, which the First World War was a part of, took away a moderating agent in the mix of ethnic, social, and  religious conflicts that the continent has always held.  Strife between ethnic groups, riots in France and Great Britain, and the over-arching influence that Russia has gained over the EU show that Europe is still struggling with issues that the Great War released.

The lamps of Europe are, at best, dim, on the anniversary of the beginning of the war.  I wonder if we will see them lit again in our lifetime?

On July 23, 1914, Austria-Hungary sent an ultimatum to Serbia over the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo by Serbian nationalists.  Basically, Austria-Hungary demanded that Serbia surrender its sovereignty in regards to how it dealt with Austria-Hungary, that Austrian officers be part of the investigation into Serbian involvement in the assassination, and that government officials in Serbia be arrested.  The Serbs were given 48 hours to unconditionally comply.  Serbia, in an attempt to avert war, ascquiesced to these demands, except for the point that Austrian officers be allowed to investigate Serbian citizens.  Austria-Hungary began preparing for war with Serbia.

Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia on July 28, beginning a conflict that would kill millions and throw most of the world into chaos for the better part of a century.  Russia, the self-styled protector of the slavic people, partially mobilized its military against Austria-Hungary on July 28, and called a full mobilization on July 30.  Germany responded with mobilization of its own.

All this came to a head on August 1, as Germany declared war on Russia.  Germany occupied Luxembourg on August 2, the same day it demanded that neutral Belgium allow German troops to transit the country on their way to France.  Finally, Germany declared war on France on August 3, giving Great Britain a reason to go to war with Germany.

A final ultimatum was sent by the British to Germany on August 4, demanding that Germany leave Belgium immediately, and that a response from the German government must be sent within hours.  As the time limit for this ultimatum ended, Great Britain entered the war, bringing in the last great power that would fight in the war until 1917.

Between all of these events was a flurry of diplomacy, both to head off the war and to encourage it.  Calls for multilateral conferences were made and ignored, as were offers for one-on-one negotiations.  From reading about the work of the diplomats, half of them seem almost naive in their belief that a general war could be avoided, if not war altogether, while the other half seem almost evil in their machinations to goad the nations of Europe into the fire.

As I read the history of this period, the thing that strikes me is how apathetic a lot of the leadership seemed to be when it came to preventing the war and how much a slave to the process of going to war they were.

Austria could have accepted the answer from Serbia.  Russia could have stayed out of the war by telling the Serbs to take their lumps for killing the Austro-Hungarian successor.  Germany could definitely have kept to its own business by not mobilizing against Russia and by not invading Luxembourg and Belgium.  Great Britain could have been more forceful in its efforts to deter Germany and Austria.  All of these countries’ leaders seem to have ridden the wave of history, rather than directing it.

Once the dominoes of mobilization and ultimatums began to fall, all of these leaders refused to pull out the next one in order to stop the avalanche.  Wilhelm, the German Kaiser, allowed himself to be cowed into continuing with the Schlieffen Plan by Moltke, his chief of staff, when he suggested that the invasion of Belgium be called off.  Nicholas changed his mind about mobilization after being browbeaten by his generals.  If either of these men had stood up to their subordinates, the war might have been avoided or at least contained.

When Otto von Bismarck was asked what would start the next war in Europe, he replied “Some damned foolish thing in the Balkans”.

He was right.

The match that lit the fuse for the First World War was a little nebbish from Serbia named Gavrilo Princip.  He was able to parlay a failed assassination attempt in the morning, along with a snack and a chauffeur who got lost, into a clear shot at Austro-Hungarian Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife.  It wasn’t great princes, or conniving politicians that sent Europe into a maelstrom, it was a 19-year-old ‘revolutionary’ who was made into a lever of history by a chance of time and place.

Princip was a member of a Serb nationalist cell in what is would eventually become Yugoslavia.  Somehow, (most indicators point to the Serbian intelligence services) they were tipped to the planned trip of the Archduke to Sarajevo and were able to get to the city with guns and explosives.  Their first attempt, in which a bomb was thrown at the motorcade, failed, but did manage to wound several people.  The group dispersed, and Princip apparently went into a shop to get something to eat.

In the meantime, the Archduke and his wife decided to visit the people who were hurt in the earlier attack, and had their chauffeur head to the hospital.  Unfortunately for them and the rest of humanity, their driver took a wrong turn, and ended up trying to turn around right in front of Princip.  The dastardly terrorist, or national hero, depending on who you are, whipped out his pistol and fired into the car, killing the Archduke and his wife.

Over the next few weeks, Austria-Hungary would declare war on Serbia, which would bring in the Russians.   Germany would declare war on Russia, in accordance with its defense treaty with Austria-Hungary.  A defense pact between the Russians and the French would expand the war to both sides of Germany’s borders.  Eventually, almost all of Europe would be engulfed, along with battles on the oceans, in Africa, Asia, and the Mid-East.

If Princip hadn’t been successful, would a European war have happened?  Probably, at some point, yes.  Germany, France, Britain, and Russia had all spent decades upgrading and augmenting their armaments.  They had locked themselves, with the sort-of exception of Great Britain, into an Edwardian version of Mutually Assured Destruction.  One of them going to war with any of the others would bring all of the others in.  I don’t really see a scenario where the great powers went to war in the first third of the 20th century without it ending up being very similar to what actually happened.  Something would have caused a war, and it just happened that an idealistic teenager with political murder on his mind set it all in motion.

So, some damned foolish thing happened in the Balkans, and it set Europe aflame.  In a way, Princip and his fellow conspirators were successful.  The war ended with the break-up of the Austro-Hungarian empire into smaller, ethnic countries, but the cost was very dear.

100 years ago today, the world was at peace, or at least as much at peace as we shaved apes can get.  We haven’t really enjoyed a day like that in the years since.  The great powers of Europe had spent several decades preparing for a war, but they had, through diplomacy or a balance of terror, kept the lid on Pandora’s box.

People went about their business as they had all their lives.  A generation of young men in all corners of the globe was coming of age and enjoying the flower of youth.  The future was bright for them, maybe in a way that hasn’t been experienced since. In five short years, that generation would be shattered and much reduced, to the point that young women in England despaired of ever marrying due to a shortage of men.

The fields of Belgium and France were much the same as they had been for centuries.  There were no trenches, shell holes, or unexploded shells to mar the picture postcard landscape.  The same could be said of Poland, Russia, Italy, and Turkey.

I don’t think anyone went to bed on June 27, 1914 realizing that they had just enjoyed the last day of peace that our world would know for many years.  I do think that the best lesson we can draw from that is to recognize that any day where humanity isn’t butchering itself wholesale is a good day, and that we should be thankful for them.  You never know when the good days will end and how long it will be until the next one comes.

This week marks the 100th anniversary of the event that ignited World War I, the horrendous event that shaped the rest of the 20th century and the aftermath of which impacts us today.  If the Great War had been avoided or gone another way, we might have been spared the millions of dead from Nazism and Communism, and the situation in the MidEast and the Third World would be drastically different.  One thing that has struck me is how few people who aren’t history nerds know much about the First World War.

I’m starting a new project here, which I’m calling “100 Years On”.  Over the next few years, I’m going to mark some of the major events in the war, from Sarajevo to Versailles.  Some of it will be information; some of it will be me editorializing on what happened and how those events are either connected to today’s world or are mirrors of things we are seeing today.

I’m not going to do a “Day by Day” kind of thing, because, to be honest, I wouldn’t be able to do that well.  I’m not an expert on the subject, and others have already done work much better than I could with my time and talent.  If you’re looking for sources of information on the war and its details, I suggest you read the outstanding books on the subject authored by Barbara Tuchman, John Keegan, and Niall Ferguson.  If you’re more of a podcast kind of person, I suggest listening to Dan Carlin’s current arc in his Hardcore History series, “Countdown to Armageddon”.

I’m sure there are other sources of information out there, and if you can recommend one, please drop a comment here.  Like I said, this is becoming a forgotten war now that the last of the veterans are gone, and that’s a shame and a danger.

I hope you enjoy.