We've finally reached the end of our long trail through the "Battle of the Frontiers" in August 1914.
Working backwards from here we looked at the final portion of the "crisis" of mid-to-late August
just this past January when we looked at the engagements along the Franco-Belgian frontier between the German right and Anglo-French left.
Before that we had a long lacuna - my fault and I apologize for it - before we discussed the other two engagement areas, the Southeast (where the French attacks into Lorraine were beaten back but the German counterattacks stalled in the Trouée de Charmes) and the Central "Battle of the Ardennes" that was perhaps the single biggest driving force behind the failure of the French Plan XVII and MAR Joffre's grand tactical operations, way back in July of 2025.
In May 2025 we took a side arc to look at SIGINT after taking a dive into the first meeting engagements that were the main event during the second two weeks of August.
February 2025 took us to the mobilization and deployment of the combatant armies during the first week of August.
In 2024 we broke down the opposing sides' aerial reconnaissance assets in November and the ground reconnaissance elements in September. We detailed French war planning and German war planning over the summer of 2024, and began with a brief scene-setting discussion of the geopolitical setting of Western Europe at sunrise on 1 AUG 1914.
To cite myself from the first entry in this series, the reason we did all this is because:
"The origins of this series go back over a decade, to the 2009 piece on the...First Battle of the Marne.
In the course of researching and writing that article my attention was drawn to the tactical issues that arose from both combatants' mis- (or lack of) understanding of their opponents. A lot of the "whys" of the Marne ran directly from the failure of strategic and/or tactical reconnaissance.
Neither side really accomplished either of their reconnaissance or security objectives, and the result was the chaotic collision that we call the Marne.
The question that I kept coming back to was...why not?
Was the problem baked into the larger operational or even the strategic planning?
Was this the result of both sides' failure to anticipate the tactical "facts on the ground" affecting reconnaissance and making plans that assumed conditions that no longer existed?
Or was it technical, the conditions themselves, that had changed beyond the ability of clever plans to account for them? Was the problem that the older means and methods of reconnaissance - horse cavalry and light infantry - and security were just no longer effective in the tactical environment of 1914, and the new techniques - air reconnaissance - un- or under-developed to the point where the commanders didn't receive (or were unable to process) the intelligence?"
Well, now we've looked at the events of August 1914 to a fairly granular level of detail, and we need to discuss what, if anything, they tell us about our hypotheses.
Were there critical failures - either of the physical reconnaissance activities of the respective armies, or of the interpretation (or lack of interpretation) of the intelligence those activities generated? And did those failures, assuming they occurred, result in combat results that led to the failure of the presumably-war-winning plans of one or both opponents.
Before we can answer that question, we need to take a look at the combat results that appear to show the effects of those reconnaissance or intelligence-analysis failures.
So...
Where can we find combat actions that reflect reconnaissance failures/analysis failures in August 1914?
Starting from bottom to top (in reverse order of the post list we started from), then, I'm going to pull out the following by area: location and (army affected) as the proofs of our hypotheses:
Center: Eastern Belgium (Germany) - Belgian defenses, including the setup of the fortress belt around Liege and their effect on available/practical German axes of attack.
Southeast: Lorraine (France) - Failure of the French 1er and 2eme Armee recon units to detect the German counterstroke that became the defeats of Morhange-Sarrebourg.
Southeast: Lorraine (Germany) - Failure of 6. and 7. Feldarmee to detect the French defenses that resulted in futile bloody attacks on the Charmes gap.
Center: Ardennes (France) - Failure to discover the presence of the three German field armies which resulted in the brutal defeats of 22-23 AUG during the Battle of the Ardennes.
Northwest: Central Belgium/Northern France (Germany) - Failure to find the BEF/western end of the Franco-British MLR in a timely fashion.
Northwest: Northern France (Germany) - Several failures to find (or correctly interpret reports of) Allied defenses at, then movements from, Mons, and the Sambre-Meuse lines, to the Marne.
Let's take a look at each in a bit more detail.
Eastern Belgium (1-16 AUG): There seems to be some agreement amongst military historians that OHL's timetable for the passage of eastern Belgium around Liege was a bit overoptimistic, but the actual time that the combination of Belgian resistance and German tactical and logistical foul-ups cost the right-wing advance isn't a fixed value.
Showalter (2019) - who's thesis, remember, is that reconnaissance problems in August cost Germany the campaign, at least, if not the war - says that, yes, recon (and operational/movement) problems did hold up the three right-wing field armies, and provides estimates for the delay ranging from two days to 4-5 days to none (citing the German official history that the predicted date of arrival for 1. Feldarmee at Mons was 23 AUG, so right on time).
The other element here is the question of what operational or tactical problems did reconnaissance failures lead to, and how did - or did - they impact the German offensive.
Certainly the failure to find the Belgian field fortifications between the fixed forts around Liege cost the Maasarmee in lives. How that impacted the larger campaign, though? That seems difficult to exaggerate. All the combatants were unprepared for the bloody cost of assaulting dug-in defenses, of which Liege was just the first of many. And when the German infantry finally did overrun the inter-fort defense lines and seize the city center it had little effect, if any, on the fortresses themselves; the heavy siege guns were still required to blow open the steel and concrete and reduce the Liege strongpoints before the right wing maneuver forces could proceed west.
So my thought is that the first of our recon-failure problems didn't have much of a campaign-level (much less war-outcome level) impact.
Lorraine (14-26 AUG): I think we can lump both the French failures of mid-August (the "Battle of Lorraine" or Morhange-Sarrebourg) and the German failure at the Charmes Gap in the third week of August (the "Battle of Trouée de Charmes") together.
I also think that we can relegate both to the same sort of "fairly minimal impact" bin we put Liege.
Yes, both the 1er and 2eme Armee, and the 6. and 7. Feldarmee, recon units made some tactically (and in human terms) lethal errors.
Had those errors been avoided? I don't see either making a real operational or strategic difference.
Both French and German offensives in Lorraine were going to be limited by the opposing fortress belts, as well as by the impact of operations elsewhere along the frontier and the tactical realities of 1914 combat. I see the possibility of a decisive French breakthrough around Sarrebourg, or a Bavarian breakout through Trouée de Charmes, as somewhere between unlikely and impossible even had the aviators and cavalrymen on both sides absolutely nailed it.
So, again, ugly in human cost, fairly minimal in the "battles that could have changed history" value.
Meaning we're left with the other three third-week-of-August failures; the German failures find and fix the Anglo-French left in Flanders - both before and after Mons/Charleroi - and the French failure to figure out what was going on in the Ardennes before the horrific collisions of 22-24 AUG.
Flanders (19-24 AUG): This takes in both the initial failure to find the open left flank of the Anglo-French defenses and the repeated failure to cut off the Allied retreats.
The German recon failures can be attributed to several issues; 1) the tactical mis-employment/poor logistical management of the strategic HKK cavalry units, 2) misdirection of aviation patrols, and 3) poor transmission of, or incorrect analysis of, aerial reconnaissance reports when they did arrive.
We'll discuss this in depth after we go through the scenarios, but the bottom line is OHL's management - from initial deployment to movement orders to logistical support - of the HKKs was generally poor. The cavalry units in the field seem to have tried their best to accomplish their missions (with the caveat that engagements like Waremme and Haelen were a cautionary tale that shouldn't have taken the lives of men and horses to have figured out beforehand) but OHL's overall strategic/grand tactical direction was appalling.
HKK 1 was useless for most of August, not because of it's (or it's commander's) fault but because OHL's initial deployment was fucked up as a football bat. HKK 2 did better (and was tactically outstanding at Le Cateau) but was still largely wasted through poor command and control from its OHL higher as well as a poor (or lack of) coordination with the field army commands that should have been getting information from the HKK's work.
German aviation seems to have been on top of reconnaissance in the field - the feldfliegerabteilungen were on top of it, anyway, though there was a larger issue with aerial assets that we'll discuss below - but the problem there was, as we discussed, a combination of poorly organized staff work (specifically the lack of a Ic aviation intelligence officer on the corps and field army staff) and an unwillingness of the field army commanders - Kluck and Bulow - to abandon preconceived ideas when presented either with contradicting intelligence or conflicting intelligence when some of the reports supported their convictions regardless of the relative number or value of the report they wanted to be correct.
That said...the larger operational/logistical/time-and-space questions that surround the whole "strong right wing" concept are hard to avoid.
As we discussed back when we talked about First Marne, the real question seems to be whether the entire right wing sweep originally envisioned by Schleiffen was militarily practical.
The lack of usable road axes of advance, and the problem of road-logistical mobility away from the railheads (and the inability of the eisenbahnbautruppen to extend those railheads in real time to keep up with the maneuver units), has been pointed out since 1918 and brings into question whether, even had the German horsemen and fliers quickly found the BEF and identified the open country west of the British, the German right wing could have effectively enveloped the Allied left with enough force to have shattered the defenses and forced a French capitulation.
So...troubling?
Yes.
Decisive?
I'm not convinced.
Let's look at the final scenario.
The Ardennes (14-24 AUG): This really was the "crisis" of the Battle of the Frontiers. If you can point to one single failure of reconnaissance that impacted the Battle of the Frontiers it's the French failure to find the German
3.,
4., and
5.Feldarmee in the Ardennes before the French FLOT was hammered flat.
Mind you, the French failures in the Ardennes are multifarious and cascading, beginning with the poorly directed, seemingly random wanderings of Sordet's cavalry corps.
They include flawed grand tactical and tactical concepts of operations, from GQG down to battalion level. Top-down, rigid, orders-driven command and control and a punitively slow orders-issue-cycle timeline that commonly meant that even when intelligence was received and analyzed in a timely manner the resulting orders were issued hours, or even days, too late. Crude tactics, including a lamentable inability of many French maneuver commanders to understand and conduct combined arms operations.
The overall narrative of the Ardennes is the French offensive bumbling blind into the woods to be surprised and decimated by a German advance that had better intelligence and more rapid, more responsive tactical reactions to the encounter battles of August.
Given the larger operational situation I don't see how Joffre's Plan XVII concept would have resulted in the "breaking the hinge" between the German left and right he envisioned even had French cavalry and aviation recon work been immaculate.
But had his central front armies been better aware of the buzzsaw they were walking into Joffre might have been able to at least stabilize the front lines much closer to the French borders and prevented the loss of so much of the coal- and iron-ore fields and manufacturing capacity in northeastern France that handicapped the French war effort.
So those failures?
Pretty damaging.
Now that we've discussed the where and when, let's talk the "whys".
Performance of the reconnaissance elements in August 1914
Infantry In our look at who was doing the recon work along the Frontiers we quickly dismissed the historically-oldest "recon" units on the ground, the "light infantry" scouts, and I'll stand by that assessment.
While still useful for local tactical recon the riflemen, jagers, and chasseurs/voltigeurs were simply too slow to contribute much more than that. A smart infantry battalion or regiment or brigade commander still had his scouts out, but for doing things like finding BEFs or preventing Ardennes disasters?
Nope. The guys just didn't have the legs anymore.
Cavalry Here we have to separate the "local" cavalry - for the French, and British, the corps and for the Belgian and French the divisional cavalry squadrons - which did just slightly more than the light infantry did, and the "strategic" cavalry; the German HKKs, the French Sordet's 1er Corps de Cavalrie, and (to some extent) the British Cavalry Division.
And here we also have to distinguish between the overall physical/technical constraints to all cavalry operations in 1914, the tactical abilities of the opposing sides' mounted units, and the operational control exerted (or failure to exert) by OHL GQG, and the BEF GHQ.
All cavalry in 1914 suffered from several problems imposed simply by the conditions of warfare at the time.
Scale, for one. The distances the horses were asked to move, and the short time require to move through them, were punitive. "Modern" war meant that human and animal endurance was pushed to, and beyond, their limits. All the "strategic" cavalry commanders, French and German, complained of the losses their units suffered simply from the wear on legs and backs, the loss of horseshoes and lack of fodder, from long march days and distance from - or lack of - resupply sources.
Several whole days in August were lost because it was a hard choice between stopping operations to rest the horses or pushing ahead and ruining, or killing, them.
Another was the greatly improved range, accuracy, and lethality, of both direct and indirect, fire of 1914 compared to the last big European wars of the 1860s and 1870s.
Simply stated, in August 1914 a man-sized target that could be seen could be hit, and, if hit, killed or badly wounded in a way that in 1870 would have been a challenge if possible at all. A horse-sized target? Damn near unmissable.
A mounted cavalryman in 1820 or 1870 took a chance scouting out his enemy's infantry position.
In 1914? The chances had become damn near certainties.
Lethal. And that's without even considering artillery.
So the option of cavalrymen "fighting for intelligence"? On foot, maybe. But that meant that once within rifle- or artillery-range of possible enemy main force elements the cavalry's mobility was reduced to a slow foot-pace sneak-and-peek to avoid blundering mounted into someone's machinegun beaten zone.
So both sides had over-optimistic ideas of how effective at reconnaissance their cavalry (and their enemy's cavalry) would be.
That said, there do seem to have been some issues that affected the French and British cavalry differently than the German.
On the operational level, the French GQG and British GHQ seem to have done a very poor job determining the objectives and directing the employment of, and collecting the information from, their mounted units.
We've discussed the futile wanderings of Sordet's troopers. The British cavalry seem to have been poorly used, although the scatterbrained deployment of the Cavalry Division doesn't seem that much more scatterbrained than Field Marshal French's August work in general.
OHL misallocated (as we also discussed) the HKKs initially, leaving the right flank spaces largely vacant and shoving four of the five into areas where they were either hemmed in by vegetation (HKK 1) or simply crowded out by infantry masses (all the others except HKK 2), and then freeing up the one that could have been useful (HKK 1) too late.
Better than GQG, which seemed to forget about Sordet altogether for days at a time. But that's a damn low bar.
At the tactical level the French cavalry, in particular, seems to have performed poorly. This 2020 article reports that in the Ardennes:
"The inability of the French cavalry divisions to obtain an accurate picture of the advance of the German 4th and 5th Armies led to serious mistakes in French operational and tactical planning. Due in great part to IR88’s success at Longlier, the French 4th and 9th Cavalry Divisions were pushed out of the way of XVIII AK and were not able to determine what the Germans were doing, nor hinder their movements. The anonymous author of the FAR (Feldartillerie Regiment) 25 regimental history said that the French cavalry simply would not fight. (italics mine)
From the smallest patrol up to the level of cavalry corps, the French cavalry avoided combat and when it unexpectedly did meet German forces, such as at Longlier, the French cavalry withdrew. The German cavalry was able to screen the movements of its own forces, while on 21 and 22 August it provided accurate information concerning the French advance."
The British cavalry, at least according to Zuber, was similarly averse to fighting for intelligence (or fighting at all but, then, Zuber...):
"In reconnaissance, counter-reconnaissance and rear-guard operations the British cavalry from 21 to 27 August was utterly ineffectual. Whether the British cavalry was superior fighting dismounted, as Jones contends, is a moot point, because it didn’t fight dismounted, but made a practice of withdrawing before the Germans could make contact.
Before Mons the British Cavalry Division failed to perform its reconnaissance and counter-reconnaissance missions. On 24 August it left the II Corps left flank floating in the air. On 25 August it failed to delay HKK 2 and IV AK. At Le Cateau it failed to provide even local security and, citing exhaustion, did nothing. The British Cavalry Division in August 1914 was an operational liability."
Much as German infantry/artillery tactical doctrine and training seem to have been more effective than the Belgian, British, or French, the Imperial cavalry seems to have been better prepared for August 1914 than their enemies.
(How much of this was, at least in part, owed to the attachment of the jager battalions I'm not sure...but at least some must have been. The German HKK cavalry divisions had in their light battalions a serious direct-fire force multiplier that neither the British nor the French had in August 1914.)
So some of the cavalry reconnaissance difference - both in general capabilities, and in increasing (for the Allies) or decreasing (for the German) the impact of the errors - looks like it was directly related to the organizational, doctrine, and training advantages of the German reiter.
Aviation This is where I suffer from a source disparity.
Bowden (2017) is a comprehensive source for all fixed-wing-aviation-things German. I have a highly detailed account of what the Fliegertruppen des deutschen Kaiserreiches did, how well (or poorly) they did it, and what impact it had.
I have several fairly decent on-line sources for the Royal Flying Corps. Not nearly as exhaustive, but at least covering the general activities of the British fliers.
I've even got some okay-ish sources for the Belgian air element.
France?
Nothing. Zero. Zip. Nada.
Okay, now...here's the thing. As we've discussed, the "most dangerous enemy course of action" for France in August 1914 was the Ardennes offensive/counteroffensive, and we know that particular sector was the least conducive for, and most poorly visible to, aerial reconnaissance.
So it's entirely possible that the Armee de l'Air was busting it's Farman ass over the wooded hills of the Ardennes but it just wasn't helpful in seeing through the canopy.
But given my lack of French sources?
I've got no idea one way or the other.
Here's what I do know, specifically about the German aviation efforts.
Technically the German fliers seem to have been solid, at least as good or better, than their French or British counterparts.
(The caveat being that in August 1914 "aerial reconnaissance" was entirely about reconnaissance; the idea of "security" - that is, denying your enemy's eyes in the sky access to your positions on the ground - was not only impossible in fact but hadn't really even occurred to anyone as a practical concept yet.
The first "fighter"-type aircraft (that is, specifically designed to attack and destroy other aircraft to deny air recon patrols) first appeared in April 1915, and the first real designed-from-the-ground up "fighter" was the Fokker E.1 in July.
Where German aerial recon issues appeared they seemed to revolve more around a combination of 1) staff organization - specifically the overworked German corps- and field army-level Ic and the lack of an aviation-specific staff pogue - and 2) poor or deliberately obtuse interpretation by the receiving maneuver commanders.
What we know of the French and British leadership's decision-making suggests similar problems there, too.
However. I'm a bit baffled by the absence of one bit of aerial reconnaissance specifically;
zeppelins.
Seriously.
When you consider the enormous time and effort OHL and the Imperial Navy put into the England raids - 51 bombing raids over two years involving 84 airships (of which 30 were lost to British fire or mishaps) dropping almost 6,000 bombs - for such meager returns, you have to wonder.
Here was a huge, stable platform, capable of carrying a radio, which (by January 1915, anyway) was capable of overflying the southeastern counties of England.
Yes, the gasbags seem to have had issues with ground fire (we discussed the three that were shot down in August when we talked about aviation assets in 1914) though the England raiders seemed to have significantly less trouble, losing only about four or five out of the thirty-odd to anti-aircraft guns.
You'd think that the combination of stability, loiter time, and radio commo would make an airship, at least one with a respectable operational ceiling, a perfect strategic reconnaissance asset.
Apparently they weren't. Was the problem low ceiling? (that certainly was a problem for Z VI, VII, and VIII) Size and speed? (even at high altitude an airship is a goddamn big, slow target). Observation? (was the "high enough to be safe" also "too high to see tiny stuff on the ground"?)
Whatever the reason, despite having and using them for reconnaissance missions at sea, the Heer had no use for them over the Western Front after the third week of August.
Go figure.
Conclusions
Criticality: Were there any potential "war-winning" actions/event along the French frontiers in August 1914 that poor reconnaissance (or poor interpretation of/reaction to recon reports) caused one side or the other to fumble? Or "war-losing" moments that poor German recon (since Germany "lost" the war, at least in conventional terms) led to?
We've agreed that of the six occasions where there seem to have been problems with reconnaissance in one form or another two look like they had some larger implications; for France in the Ardennes, and for Germany in Flanders.
So..?
Ardennes, definitely a huge problem for France; failure to find, and prepare for, the German attacks in the third week of August put paid to any hope - slim as it probably was - of Plan XVII "working" as it was supposed to.
The effect, however, was really less of a 'war-losing disaster" and more of a "forced to give up illusions of a war-winning victory". So troublesome, but not really "critical" to the larger outcome of the war. Gemany didn't lose, or France win, the war in the Ardennes in August 1914.
Flanders, a problem for Germany, yes, though more of a "limited the gains" problem than a "totally changed the outcomes/lost the war" between Mons/Charleroi and the Marne.
And in effect the reconnaissance failures seem likely to have balanced each other out; the French failure in the Ardennes was somewhat offset by the German failures to catch and kill 5er Armee and the BEF. Between them both they set the table for the collision along the Marne in September that effectively stopped the German invasion and started the grind of positional warfare that lasted for the following four years.
Responsibility: Why did the recon work that was unsatisfactory - for France in the Ardennes, for Germany in Flanders - fail? Was there an individual, or a branch, or an organization, training, or doctrine responsible?
Let's look at it by reconnaissance asset type.
Infantry? No, other than poor overall French infantry/artillery training and doctrine. Infantry recon was a purely local task, and doesn't seem to have been involved significantly in either critical failure event.
Cavalry? Yes. To an extent, both in general and specific to one of the combatants.
The physical realities of modern war in 1914 meant that mounted cavalry couldn't possibly as effective at reconnaissance (tho at dismounted security both sides' cavalry was still fairly effective) as it had been, or that the highest levels of command thought it would be. Plans that depended on ground recon by cavalry units were destined to produce less-than-optimal results.
However, the degree to which those results were suboptimal seems to have varied based on national differences in organization, training, doctrine, and leadership. The German cavalry seems to have been better prepared that either the British or French mounted units. We simply don't have enough combat encounters to say anything about the Belgian cavalry.
Aviation? Also sort of yes-and-no.
The actual flying contingents for which I have good or at least decent information - Germany and Great Britain - appear to have been technically competent and effective in the field to the extent which the state of their fragile and weather-dependent aircraft allowed. For the Belgian fliers, like their cavalry, I simply lack data, and the French fliers are a mystery shrouded in a source-free enigma.
What was lacking was at the command and staff levels. The organization for collecting, analyzing, and reporting aerial recon information was either rudimentary or, often, so poor that it broke down under combat stress. And the maneuver commanders - the German field army commanders and OHL, the French army commanders and GQG, the British corps commanders and GHQ - often disbelieved, or misinterpreted, or just ignored, the aerial recon stuff.
And, as we've mentioned, the closest to a "one simple war-winning trick" the air recon work seems to have come was the retreat from Mons/Charleroi, where if some of the sources are to be believed, quick and correct analysis of, and operations based on, several reports might have bagged 5re Armee and the BEF.
Might have.
After looking at all these events I'm not really convinced, though, and even less convinced that it was a problem of poor reconnaissance alone rather than a messy collision of the "fog of war", some poor field recon, and equally poor intelligence analyses.
In the end I think the culmination of the battles along the frontiers that August - stalemate and prolonged trench warfare - was likely from the outset.
The vastly increased lethality of both direct and indirect fire, and the increased logistical capacity to sustain it, meant that without a similar increase in tactical mobility (armored vehicles, aircraft) and speed of communication (tactical radio) the ability of any attack to produce a large enough, sustained enough, and damaging enough breakthrough to completely destroy a modern army was diminished to the point of near-nullity, as the Western Front demonstrated for the following four-odd years.
Add to that the problems inherent in the German "strong right wing" plan; van Creveld and Liddell-Hart weren't wrong.
The conditions on the ground, and the military technologies, of 1914 meant that it would have required several fortuitous, linked events - a linkage that the "friction" of war (drink!) made something between highly improbable to damn near impossible - going Germany's way to have resulted in the decisive envelopment that the generation of Schleiffen and Moltke had anticipated.
Instead we got the result of the actual August 1914 that set in motion the Western Front of World War 1 and all the changes and consequences that come from it down to our present day.
Among the military changes were several involving "reconnaissance".
Perhaps the single biggest - certainly to the minds of the military planners and commanders of the 1914 generation - of these was the final separation of cavalry and ground reconnaissance, or, indeed, of ground troops in general as the primary element of reconnaissance altogether. Above the purely local tactical level, anyway.
Armies of 1915 and later would still use infantry patrols, and, after the development of practical armored vehicles, light armored/mounted recon units, to learn about nearby enemy positions, strengths, and activities.
But field intelligence above the grand tactical level now meant aerial (and, today, satellite) eyes-on. Which, in turn, meant a progression of reconnaissance and counter-reconnaissance developments; better observation aircraft and tools such as aerial cameras, then counter-reconnaissance aircraft ("pursuit" or "fighter") to keep the enemy's aircraft out, then counter-fighter-fighters - escorts or sweeps - to clear those skies for the recon birds.
Better AAA defenses. Radar. Better aircraft. Better radar. Even better aircraft.
Satellites. Computers. And so on and on.
At least one thing hasn't changed, however.
All the people who led their nations, and armies, into war in the late summer of 1914 believed they could "win". That armed force, military power, would bring material benefits to their nation. Increased wealth. More economic and political power.
More "happiness", if you will, if by that you mean more of the things that they, and the people of the nations they led, wanted and believed would make their lives better in some form, whether material, emotional, political, or spiritual.
All of them were wrong.
Catastrophically, horrifically, appallingly wrong.
Not just in beginning the years of war they set in immediate train, but in everything that cascaded down from there; the chaotic post-war disasters in eastern and southern Europe that followed the devolution of Austria-Hungary, Germany, and Russia, the inevitability of the brutal Soviet, Nazi, and Italian Fascist dictatorships (and all the other little dictators in places like the Balkans and Spain). Wars, rumors of wars, deaths, starvation, depression and inflation, disease and epidemic, every conceivable human misery.
All of it, all that unhappiness, because the political and military leaders and peoples of that last summer of the Long Peace couldn't not believe that "war works".
That there were, indeed, "good wars and bad peace".
That hasn't changed a bit.
Every war, every rebellion, every armed conflict ever begun was, and is, begun because the people who began, or will begin, them believed with all their hearts that those wars will "work" and will get them what they think they want.
They have no thoughts of "unintended consequences", although those consequences are inevitable and inescapable and follow every war as surely as night follows the day.
Perhaps the best exposition of how utterly ruinous their collective delusions were comes from the pen of G. M. Fraser, in the words he puts in the mouth of his character Harry Flashman, from the novel
Mister American:
"Mr. Franklin replied noncommittally, and asked the General what he thought of the war situation. The old man shrugged.
"Contemptible - but of course it always is. We should stay out, and to hell with Belgium. After all, it's stretching things to say we're committed to 'em, and we'd be doing 'em a favor - and the Frogs, too."
"By not protecting them, you mean? I don't quite see that."
"You wouldn't - because like most idiots you think of war as being between states - colored blobs on the map. You think if we can keep Belgium green, or whatever color it is, instead of Prussian blue, then hurrah for everyone. But war ain't between colored blobs - it's between people. You know what people are, I suppose - chaps in trousers, and women in skirts, and kids in small clothes."
The General took a pull at his wine and grimaced. "I wish to God that someone would tell the Hungarians that their wine would be greatly improved if they didn't eat the grapes first. Anyway, imagine yourself a Belgian - in Liege, say. Along come the Prussians and invade you. What about it? A few cars commandeered, a shop or two looted, half a dozen girls knocked up, a provost marshal installed, and the storm's passed. Fierce fighting with the Frogs, who squeal like hell because Britain refuses to help, the Germans reach Paris, peace concluded, and that's that."
"And there you are, getting on with your garden in Liege. But..." - the General wagged a bony finger - "...suppose Britain helps, sends forces to aid little Belgium - and the Frogs - against the Teuton horde? What then? Belgian resistance is stiffened, the Frogs manage to stop the invaders, a hell of a war is waged all over Belgium and northeast France, and after God knows how much slaughter and destruction the Germans are beat - or not, as the case may be. How's Liege doing? I'll tell you - it's a bloody shambles. You're lying mangled in your cabbage patch, your wife's had her legs blown off, your daughters have been raped, and your house is a mass of rubble. You're a lot better off for British intervention, ain't you?" He sat back, grinning sardonically.
(There's a bit more of this discussion, which, if you like, is well worth reading and not just for this bit. It's a fun book in a lot of ways, and worth a look if you can find a copy, long out of print as it is. Anyway, our author has his spokesman conclude...)
He drowned this wistful reminiscence with a hearty gulp of wine, shuddered with distaste, and went on: "I'd also like to remind our jingo-drunk public that they haven't the least notion what a war with modern weapons will be like and the only fellows who can even guess are your American survivors from places like Antietam and Shiloh - that's the only real war that's been in a hundred years."
The General pointed an accusing spoon at Mr. Franklin. "Know how many men went down at Gettysburg? Fifty thousand - and if I hadn't moved damned lively I'd have been one of 'em. Well, how many Gettysburgs d'you think it will take to settle a scrap between the kind of forces under arms in Europe today? I don't know - perhaps a month of it would make everyone cry quits, but knowing the sort of clowns who'll be in command - who are always in command - I take leave to doubt it."
The ironic part of this little sermon, and what moves it from cynicism to genuine tragedy, is that those in command, in the palaces and the ministries and the field headquarters, were not clowns. They were, for the most part, serious, learned, accomplished, well-intentioned men who genuinely wanted and hoped and tried what they thought was the best for what they thought of as their nations and peoples.
And they were wrong.
Wrong about cavalry. Wrong about aviation. Wrong about reconnaissance.
Wrong about technology, tactics, strategies, casualties, logistics, politics, economics. Wrong about war, and, through that, wrong about everything that came from it and, through their mistakes and misconceptions then, created so much of what is wrong in our today.
