The Great War began with the enthusiastic consent of most of the peoples in the countries of Europe. All imagined they were fighting for the Right and for Justice. Rupert Brookeâ??s words:
â??Now God he thanked Who has matched us with His hour And caught our youth, and wakened us from sleepingâ?
were echoed all over the Continent which was so soon to be full of misery, of dead and dying. Everyone imagined too that the war would be short, and very few people imagined that it would be a total war involving the whole population of Europe. There was confidence on both sides that the enemy could be taught a sharp lesson. And so the war began with great offensives by the principal Continental powers. The Austrians, who had invaded Serbia, advanced into Russian Poland, and, by mid-August, two huge Russian armies, badly equipped but full of a belief in the might of Holy Russia, crossed into East Prussia. The Germans violated the neutrality of Belgium and brought Britain into the war on 4 August. The French on 7 August advanced into upper Alsace and reached the Rhine on 19 August, whilst the main French offensive by the First and Second Armies advanced into Lorraine.
For some ten years before 1914, the French Ecole de Guerre and the High Command had accepted a doctrine that war was won by the nation which most resolutely adopted the offensive, and Napoleonâ??s phrase that â??morale is to the physical as three to oneâ? had been elevated into a sacred dogma by those who constituted the brains of the French Army. Had not the Germans â??marched to the sound of cannonâ? in 1870? At manoeuvres; held before 1914, the commander who showed the greatest impulsiveness in searching out the enemy and bringing him to battle won the greatest praise from the High Command. And so at Morhange-Saarebourg on 14 August, the French infantry, still clad in the red and blue uniforms of 1870, were launched into a furious attack on the army of Prince Ruprecht of Bavaria. The attackers were shattered by the German machine-guns and rapid rifle-fire from defensive positions, and the same story occurred in other battles along the Alsace-Lorraine Front. As happened in 1940, the French General Staff had planned to fight a war on the lines of the last war. They paid the penalty in 1914 of huge losses in the finest divisions of the French Army.
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