ABSTRACT
The Napoleonic campaigns which had swept across Europe, and the ensuing nationalist conflicts, such as the Franco-Prussian War, had been unprecedented events. Many historians have considered the First and Second World Wars as a single European civil war. In 1914, Germany, the country which more than any other at that time focused its politics on aggressive rearmament, had no interest in entering an extended war. A great British historian has written that the war broke out because of the rigidity of railway timetables, which in turn was linked to the rigidity of military plans. While the crisis was leading to war, at the two extremes of society many intellectuals and working-class movements found themselves increasingly isolated in reasonableness. Belgium was a scene of propagandist conflict before it became a theatre of war. Once occupied, the country became a 'seedbed' of the daily violence that would fill Europe with atrocities during the Second World War.
