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This chapter shows that Germany reaped a bitter harvest in August and September 1914. The bold notion of winning the opening campaign quickly by a powerful out-flanking stroke through Belgium had had a desperate quality ever since Schlieffen conceived it. The tradeoff for provoking Belgium and England, however, was a superiority of numbers in one region of the western front. Indeed, it was in Belgium that Moltke probably missed his best chance of “rolling the iron dice” and winning.

This chapter charts the evolution of the western European prisoner of war ‘regime’. It shows how Britain's experience of captivity during the Great War contributed to the development of a distinctively benign view on the issue of captivity, both within military and government circles and within society at large. It examines the part played by the United Kingdom government in drafting the 1929 Geneva Convention for POWs, and shows how closely the resultant POW regime reflected British interests and experience.

This chapter shows that the failure of the German Army to defeat France in 1914 allowed the nightmarish scenario of prewar games and exercises to come true: a long slugging match on two fronts. The great victory over the Russians at Tannenberg could not prevent this. Faced with an intensifying, widening, and deadlocked war, Germany invested heavily in weapons that had proven themselves since August 1914 or in new technologies that promised victory. Germany's prewar stock of 2,450 machine guns was impressively expanded to 8,000 in 1915. Monthly manufacturing totals rose from 200 to 600 that year, accelerating geometrically to 2,300 by mid-1916 as factories perfected methods of mass production.

This chapter describes the confluence of political, technological, and social changes that prompted the emergence of covert military intervention as an escalation-control technique. It lays the foundation for assessing how more recent political and technological changes, such as cyberwarfare and drones, influence the covert sphere. In particular, this chapter highlights the special role of World War I. It conceptualizes the Great War as a critical juncture that dramatized the dangers of large-scale war escalation and accelerated political, social, and technological developments that influenced escalation control. These changes sharpened the problem of escalation control by making leaders more vulnerable to hawkish domestic constraints and making intentions about limited war harder to discern. Yet it also made possible new ways of using military force anonymously through, for example, the development of airpower. World War I prompted major powers to experiment with ways of limiting war; this included manipulation of the form of external military intervention.

This chapter looks at Conrad's writing during the Great War as his response to the conflict. It then turns its attention to Conrad's lifelong obsession with Napoleon Bonaparte, exploring Conrad's representations of Napoleon throughout his career and culminating with his sustained effort to represent the Napoleonic era in his final works. The chapter places Conrad's interest in Napoleon in a French Romantic literary tradition, drawing comparisons between Conrad's work and that of Victor Hugo and Alexandre Dumas. The chapter argues that Conrad's view of Napoleon shifts in response to the First World War. The critical attitude to the French Emperor and his complex position in European and Polish culture seen in A Personal Record and ‘Autocracy and War’ is replaced with a more accepting view of Napoleonic greatness in The Rover and Suspense, one still treated, of course, with Conrad's characteristic scepticism.

This chapter focuses on the importance of internal cohesion in a battalion. During the course of the Great War, the East Kent Regiment along with the entire British army faced the huge task of trying to maintain internal cohesion in the most difficult circumstances. The flood of volunteers, later supplemented with conscripts, mostly lacked any type of military experience; they had to be moulded rapidly into efficient fighting units and made to understand and respect the ways of the army. However, the army was pragmatic enough to realise that it also had to change and modify its approach in order to maintain general harmony and effectiveness in a time of such unprecedented emergency. In addition, heavy casualties meant that battalions were rebuilt, sometimes almost from scratch, several times over. The medal rolls reveal that some 35,000 men passed through the Buffs during the course of the war. In these circumstances, the task of re-establishing an identity both survivors and fresh drafts could accept and rally round was a challenging one. Understanding how the regiment reacted to these conditions is vital to an overall analysis of its performance during the Great War.

This chapter puts the Liberal support of the Great War in the context of 19th-century British Liberalism. This legacy places an exceptionally high degree of value on Reason, a priority that results often in a reliance on verbal reason over factual evidence. This susceptibility is evidenced in the rhetoric of support for the war, which was at odds with the major tenets of Liberal policy, and so evinced a most strenuous exercise of sheer verbal rationalization. The language of “seeming reason” is followed across a wide body of writing in support of the war, ranging from the partisan press to scholarly articles and monographs. The prevalence of this new tone in national politics is established as the basis of a number of verbal initiatives in literary modernism, beginning with the critical work of I. A. Richards, whose signature doctrine of “pseudo-statement” answers specifically to the tone of the political times.

This chapter explores how questions of national identity and patriotism took center stage with the outbreak of war in 1914. For Nietzsche’s orphans, the cultural heritage upon which musical metaphysics was based became particularly problematic, leading to attempts to redefine contemporary German militarism as “Prussian” in contrast to the “German” values embodied in past cultural achievements. Russia’s salvific task in this “Holy War” (it was argued) was to save all humanity from the evils of “Prussianism”. The impact of growing exclusive nationalism is assessed in relation to all three composers, who failed to reunify society: Scriabin through his death in 1915; Rachmaninoff through his pessimistic outlook on events; and Medtner through his now unacceptable “German” identity.

This chapter discusses the events leading to the Great War. When Russia refused to cancel its mobilization, Germany declared war on Russia and France. On 4 August, units of the German cavalry rode into Belgium. On the same day, England declared war on the violators of Belgian neutrality and Europe's conflagration had begun. Germany's long debate about war in the machine age had ended. The battlefield experience of high summer 1914 adjudicated all prewar disputes.

This chapter describes the way European élites became aware of the rising power of America following the Spanish–American war of 1898; shows how the British saw a chance to create a new Anglo-Saxon power, and their disappointments; highlights awareness that America as a great power was different, with a commercial, mass cultural and human dynamism — of personalities — which seemed likely to sweep the world, and could not leave Europe untouched; this chapter also presents the repertoire of reactions by politicians, philosophers, crowned heads, news media, Churches to the new presence in all its forms. In its second half, the chapter describes impact of America on the Great War: men, ideas, commerce, cinema, Wilson, suggesting the legacy which survived after Wilson's debacle in Paris.

The Prologue presents the need for a historically informed reading of the modernist literature prompted by the Great War of 1914-1918. The prominence of Paul Fussell's The Great War and Modern Memory has allowed critical attention to be focused on the combat writing of the war. But the proper contemporary context for reading and understanding the modernist literature of the war, which was prompted by the civilian circumstances of urban London and the policy documents of the partisan Liberal press, has still to be reconstructed. This work of historical reconstruction and critical analysis is the major project of The Great War and the Language of Modernism.

This chapter tracks Eliot's poetic development from his arrival in London in August 1914 until the publication of The Waste Land in 1922. The initial difficulties he experienced in composing poems are attributed to the oppressive hegemony of Liberal rationalist language in the capital, which Eliot records in letters and reviews. The poet breaks the blockage by writing verse exercises in French, indulging the sheer acoustic of the foreign language, and manipulating the sense-making gestures of French in creative play. This breakthrough initiative is developed in the pseudo-logical prosody of the major quatrain poems of 1917-1919, “Sweeney among the Nightingales”, “Burbank with a Baedeker: Bleistein with a Cigar”, and “A Cooking Egg”, while the monologue of “Gerontion” exercises the new poetics in a vivid evocation of its founding historical context. The draft manuscripts and revisions of The Waste Land are discussed in relation to the same poetic principles.

This chapter situates Virginia Woolf's creative response to the Great War in the deep context of the English Liberalism she knew intimately through her father, Sir Leslie Stephen, who was a dean of high Victorian Liberal thought. Where the Liberal government travestied the language of rationalism in its defense of its war policy, Woolf found freedom from the Word of an oppressive patriarchy. Her major development shows in her masterful play with the gestures and postures of logical language. This countermeasure surfaces first in the short stories she wrote during and just after the war, most notably “The Mark on the Wall” and “Solid Objects”. The liberation she enjoyed is witnessed in the new verbal textures of her characteristically modernist novels, most notably Jacob's Room, Mrs. Dalloway, and To the Lighthouse, where her stylistic experiments are matched with probing accounts of the historical legacy of the war.

Masaryk and Beneš fled the Czech lands in 1914 and worked abroad for the rest of the war, meeting with leaders and diplomats in London, Paris, and Washington and organizing a Czech-led fighting force on the side of the Allies. The myth they created drew on the tenets of 19th-century romantic nationalism, particularly the work of historian František Palacký, but updated his ideas for the new Wilsonian order. They claimed that Czechs and Slovaks were brother nations, the country's Germans an insignificant minority, and that all “Czechoslovaks” would faithfully uphold Wilsonian democratic ideals. None of this was quite true. But, unlike other small nations petitioning the Great Powers, the Czechs received everything they asked for, thanks in no small part to Masaryk and Benes's propaganda work.