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Never again must Vienna have reason to doubt the value of its alliance with Germany.
It was at this point that the Balkan crisis became a European one.
It is scarcely going too far to say that the Hohenzollerns—assisted, of course, by their brilliant servant Otto von Bismarck—invented modern Germany.
Centuries earlier they had invented Prussia, a country so completely artificial that at the end of World War II it would simply and forever cease to exist.
to knock France out of action in the west in no more than six weeks,
In preparing to do so, he trembled so badly that he had difficulty putting on his glasses.
Moltke’s assigned place in history has generally been among the fools and weaklings.
(Bismarck had joked that if it ever invaded Germany, he would have it arrested).
There is no better example of how the governmental machinery created by Bismarck proved inadequate to deal with the dangers and complexities of the twentieth century, when Bismarck’s strong hand and towering intellect no longer controlled the levers of power.
Then, suddenly, Kluck crashed into a mass of dug-in riflemen freshly arrived from England.
the discovery, on the body of a Russian officer killed in a skirmish, of the plans for both Russian armies.
One of Hoffman’s men moved out of a protected position and, under enemy fire, picked him up and carried him to safety.
But his rescuer would claim years later, in a notorious book, that his escape without a scratch was his first intimation that he was being spared for some great future.
Many thousands of these youngsters lie in a single mass grave a short distance north of Ypres.
An entire corps of Indian troops, tough Gurkha
Haig had forty thousand men, many of them Indian colonials, to throw into the attack.
A division of Indian troops freshly arrived in Europe was almost annihilated while crossing a mile of open
ground; the few who reached the enemy line alive were promptly gassed.
by the end of the war women would fill more than a third of all industrial jobs in Britain and France,
One was a campaign of submarine warfare aimed at commercial shipping, at starving the British Isles.
“The war is not over,”
making good his losses.
In a real sense Russia’s collapse and the revolution that followed stemmed directly from Petrograd’s inability to resupply Brusilov and from Evert’s failure to give him support.
A British and French financial collapse—never mind the outright defeat of the two nations—would have been a disaster
for the U.S. economy.
In purely practical business terms, it became dangerous for the United States not to enter the war.
