That being so, then one can only conclude that Britain was ready to jump at any excuse for a war with Germany and was, therefore, prepared and able to field an army of a size to fight a continental war.
Failing that, then, Britain would obviously have a great deal of faith in the ability of the French Army, which of course was huge, to defeat Germany regardless of the example of the Franco/Prussian War.
It’s been years since I read it, but there is an excellent and very readable treatment of the many factors leading to WWI in Barbara Tuchman’s “The Guns of August”.
My recollection of one often overlooked but interesting aspect is that because of the reliance on railway transport and the intricacies of timetabling to move troops and supplies there was a degree of almost unstoppable momentum once the German war machine got going. This contemporary comment reported by Tuchman, has stuck in my mind, along the lines “The German Army takes the best brains and puts them on railway timetabling, and sends them mad.”
Tuchman’s account is very definitely the ‘Vicars nickers’ on this topic!
Why am I not surprised that you’ve read it? 
It sits, permanently, on my bedside table…next to Monica Bellucci 
That’d be the sheila that Bill Clinton didn’t have to reimburese for her dry cleaning, owing to her being a bit slack in the laundry department?
Naahh! That was her sister!
http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000899/
http://resolutereader.blogspot.com/2006/10/barbara-w-tuchman-guns-of-august.html
In the link, it refers to Sir John French as being ‘cowardly’ I don’t think that that is Tuchman’s description of him. She explains his situation rather well.
I think that ‘cowardly’ is a very difficult description to apply to a commander.
Indecisive, weak, irresolute, unwilling to suffer casualties, and many other criticisms may be applied to any commander, as may positive comments such as cautious, prudent, concerned for his men which, depending upon one’s viewpoint, could all apply to the same commander in a given situation.
But at the HQ level of divisional, corps or army commanders, (and frequently brigade and perhaps battalion CO’s) cowardice in the sense of being afraid of being personally hurt in the same sense it is applied to front line troops is generally a fairly empty criticism.
Yes, Indeed. The ‘cowardly’ comment is taht of the book reviewer. Tuchman was a person and writer/commentator of class - not crass.
I might add that I don’t like anyone being called ‘a coward’.
It’s a great Victorian or Edwardian eptithet, but it means nothing.
I find it particularly obnoxious when women at no risk of immediate harm but expecting men to go off to distant places to defend them handed them white feathers, in both world wars, presumably plucked from a chicken which was not a ration available to the troops who were actually fighting in far off places to save these grand feminist heroines.
Courage is doing something you’re scared of doing. The more you’re scared of it, the more courageous your act.
Some blokes of gentle disposition displayed more courage just going into camp than others of greater fortitude did charging the enemy under fire.
Some blokes who fought on and on, fighting their fear every moment, couldn’t do it any more. They didn’t become life-long ‘cowards’ in a moment, nor did their moment of inability to continue wipe out what they had endured and done beforehand.
I don’t know how I’d define a coward.
I do know I’d be very reluctant to label any soldier, sailor or airman who was on active service facing the enemy as a coward.
That’s not the same thing as regarding a man as letting down his mates, which is both a lesser and greater offence.
One of the causes of the shift in the balance of power in Europe, was the Royal Navy. Britain had, since Trafalgar, a navy that was far greater in size than that any other nation. When they launched HMS Dreadnought, the first of the Dreadnought Class of Battleship, they changed the goal-posts. The Dreadnought rendered all other Battleships obsolete. Therefore, other nations could build their own Dreadnoughts and compete with Britain as rulers of the waves. Thus, began a whole new arms race.
http://www.royalnavalmuseum.org/visit_see_20th_dreadnought.htm
Count Alfred von Schlieffen, Chief of the German General Staff from 1891 to 1906 was, like all German officers, schooled in Clausewitz’s precept, ‘The heart of France lies between Brussels and Paris’. It was a frustrating axiom because the path it pointed to was forbidden by Belgian neutrality which Germany, along with the other four major European powers, had guaranteed in perpetuity. Believing that war was a certainty and that Germany must enter it under conditions that gave her the most promise of success, Schlieffen, determined not to allow the Belgian difficulty to stand in Germany’s way. Of the two classes of Prussian officer, the bull-necked and the wasp-waisted, he belonged to the second. Monocled and effete in appearance, cold and distant in manner, he concentrated with such single-mindedness on his profession that when an aide, at the end of an all-night Staff ride in East Prussia, pointed out to him the beauty of the River Pregel sparkling in the rising sun, the General gave a brief, hard look and replied, ‘An unimportant obstacle’. So too, he decided, was Belgian neutrality.
Source: The Guns of August – Barbara W Tuchman
A very good book - and film - on this subject, is Pat Barker’s Regeneration, both are excellent. Also, I recently treated myself to a DVD of the original film of All Quiet on the Western Front! Again both book and film are excellent. Another read describing the realities of war, from a personal account, is Robert Graves’s Goodbye to All that which was also a source for Pat Barker’s Regeneration.
From my own experiences, the chiselled mesomorph is not necessarily the bravest soldier when the odd angry shot is zipping about. No, it’s usually the bespectacled endomorphs, or the goofy ectomorphs that turn out to be the brave ones. Probably because it is least expected of them and, perhaps, they finally find themselves. What ever the reason, they’re as brave as they come.
Many soldiers experiencing the fear of a fire-fight, or a stonking, for the first time, find courage when seeing the fear in their mates’ eyes and realize that it’s okay to be scared.
It must be about 35 years since I read Graves, but it was an outstanding book.
I think that WWI produced better writers than WWII in some ways, on both sides. Remarque stands the test of time. Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon’s poetry capture war’s horrors, none better than Owen’s “Dulce Et Decorum Est Pro Patria Mori” (It is a sweet and fitting thing to die for one’s country"). The last verse sums up the futility and hypocrisy of war in a few words.
Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs,
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots,
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame, all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of gas-shells dropping softly behind.Gas! GAS! Quick, boys! — An ecstasy of fumbling
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time,
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And flound’ring like a man in fire or lime.—
Dim through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.
In all my dreams before my helpless sight
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.If in some smothering dreams, you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin,
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs
Bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues, —
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.
Spike Milligan’s account (?in Adolf Hitler: My Part in His Downfall?) of breaking and running as a gunner in Italy after solid service in North Africa and Italy is about the only published personal account I can recall by someone who couldn’t take it any more during WWII. It haunted him for the rest of his life, not least because he wasn’t allowed to return to the front to redeem himself.
‘Anthem For Doomed Youth’, is a recently published compilation of poems from different authors from the various armies of WW1. It takes its title from the work of Wilfred Owen.