ABSTRACT
Incredibly, many Europeans went to war with little regret in 1914. Some people found it an escape from the unheroic everyday of the bourgeois world, a chance for heroism and self-sacrifice to redeem the materialism in which they lived. 1 Others saw more precise opportunities. German economists and generals thought that the nightmare of encirclement could be ended once and for all; British sailors thought that the chance had come to end German pretensions to sea power; French soldiers saw in victory the only acceptable revenge for Sedan. The kaiser and many other Germans dreamed of a racial victory over the Slav. Habsburg statesmen dreamed of solving the nationalities problem. So did some of their subjects: the Czech Progressive party manifesto of May 1914 said that 'the Czech question would be solved more justly by war than it has been hitherto solved by peace'. 2
