ABSTRACT
The most persistent assumption underlying the decisions of July 1914 was the illusion that the war would be short. The thinking behind this was relatively simple: modern methods of transportation and communication created unprecedented opportunities for speed and mobility in attack. This lesson had been learned in the Franco-Prussian war of 1870. The Prussian use of railways had been decisive; the French, after all, had had as many men under arms and were, in every measurable military category, as powerful as the Germans. The difference, it was believed, was to be found in the Prussian ability to harness the new possibilities for warfare to be found in industrial society. The lessons that might have been learned by the Russo-Japanese war and by the Balkan wars had been discounted accordingly: they had not been fought by peoples or in regions to which the new technology applied. The ‘only true defence is offence,’ insisted one British strategist (Colonel Ewart); the belief in home defence was ‘the most poisonous strategic fallacy ever propounded by man’ (Gooch, 1974: 289). The war plans of the great powers before 1914 hinged on railway timetables and the rapid deployment of men in the field.
