The latter is an entirely different period of history, looking at 14th century Europe, largely through the perspective of a high French nobleman, Enguerrand de Coucy, who had ties to many European royalties and was involved in a lot of the events of the century.

It's funny, thinking about that, how little had changed between the battle of Nicopolis in 1396, when incompetent leadership and criminally skewed priorities on the "Crusader" side contributed to a devastating defeat against the Osmans, and the attitudes of WW1 commanders that you described below.

What pisses me off the most about WW1 and the military leadership there, is this: the Western Front wasn't moving. Everybody knew that the Western Front wasn't moving and was completely deadlocked. But there was a whole lot of movement elsewhere - by the time the American tanks finally did bring movement to the Western Front, the British had forced the issue in the East and the end was coming for the Central Powers one way or another. So why did they keep feeding lives into that maw of destruction that was the Western Front in completely futile attacks, instead of deploying their soldiers in places where they could actually make a difference? Not that the slaughter in the Eastern Front, Italian Front and elsewhere wasn't equally horrific in scale - Austria-Hungary lost insane amounts of men too, without ever fighting on the Western Front, and Russia still more. But at least there they were fighting for a reason.

Agreed, I really like her. Haven't read those others you mention, I probably should.

Indeed. Not that that was new... I read Orlando Figes' book on the Crimean War not long ago, and there too the military incompetence beggars belief at times.

I guess it had a lot to do with people thinking it would be a war like the previous wars - the Franco-Prussian, Austro-Prussian and Danish-Prussian Wars, or the Italian fight for unification - in which a short (though possibly bloody) campaign would lead to negotiations and some negotiated result, in which more often than not the conquering armies would withdraw and give up the territories they had temporarily held, or at least most of them. Without thinking about how technology had changed, and how a war without a clearly superior side could rapidly result in losses so staggering that a rapid armistice and negotiated peace became very difficult. They should have heeded the warnings of the Crimean War instead.

In hindsight, one could make a valid case that Europe would have been a lot better off if the British *had* stayed out of it and left the Germans on their own, or if despite the combined efforts of British and French as described in The Guns of August, the Germans *had* taken Paris one month into the war, like the last time. And I say that as a Belgian. Although I guess you could say that in that case, it would only have been a matter of time before the next war, which might have been equally bloody as WW1 the way it did happen.

I don't think you can absolve the French in particular from all blame. They too wanted their revenge for the Prussian War. Der Kaiser was a complicated man, not so easily pinned down, as far as I can tell - sabotaging his own government half of the time, like in that Agadir episode that surely is mentioned in one or both of the books. I'm sure you're right about him escalating the Franz Ferdinand incident, though.

Agreed, though as I said above, the thing pissing me off most of all is simply the strategic decisions of the British and Germans of where to deploy the mass of their troops (the French didn't really have that many choices, I guess) - and their refusal to keep things passive on that Western Front. Time was ticking in the Allies' advantage, at least from a certain point onwards - those offensives were just so pointless.

Serbia/Yugoslavia beats them all, I think, but yes, the French losses were insane. As I've argued before in other threads, there is only one instance in American history that is remotely comparable to the European losses in WW1 (and, for Germany and Russia at least, WW2), and that is the South in the Civil War, but nobody cares about them since they had slaves and they lost. Perhaps if the South had been the winning side, Americans would have an easier time understanding how the Europeans turned so pacifist under the influence of WW1 (and, again, WW2 in some countries).

I agree.