ABSTRACT
Although there is general agreement on the causes and consequences of World War I, one major question still waits for a comprehensive answer: how did so many fail to foresee trench warfare? The Europeans who went to war in 1914 came from almost totally literate nations. They had daily newspapers, magazines, and learned journals for all interests. They had an abundant supply of books on the probable course of future wars as well as four decades of anticipations and forecasts about ‘The Next Great War’. And yet only one man found the evidence to warn the Europeans that they were heading for ‘a great war of entrenchments’. Although Ivan Bloch did not foresee the deadly mix of weaponry - aeroplanes, armoured fighting vehicles, machine guns, massed artillery bombardments, poison gas, submarines - that led to unprecedented casualty lists, he foresaw that ‘everybody will be entrenched in the next war’. His eight-year study of the Franco-German War had convinced him that the magazine rifle and quick- firing artillery would lead to ‘increased slaughter – increased slaughter on so terrible a scale as to render it impossible to get troops to push the battle to a decisive issue’. 1
