Few people in 1900 conceived that a major war was coming that would last for years and devastate the old world order. There was tension between the great powers, certainly, and an international arms race was underway, but such tensions were not new, and had not in the past led to major wars.
Europe had been largely at peace since the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815. When fighting did break out between leading states – Austria and Prussia in 1866, France and Prussia in 1870–71 – it had all been over in weeks or months.
By the start of the 20th century a new mood of belligerent aggression had arisen among the ruling elites. At this time, conflict between nations was often seen in Darwinian terms, a matter of ‘the survival of the fittest’. It was widely believed that the state had a call on its citizens’ lives, as embodied in the practice of conscription (first introduced on a mass scale in France a hundred years before). In many European countries young adult males were obliged to serve in the military, generally for two years, followed by an annual service of several weeks in the reserves. This system laid the base for the vast armies that were deployed when the First World War broke out in 1914. A habit of military obedience colluded with the mood of patriotic war fever to override doubts about going to war, such as religious objections or a belief in international solidarity among workers. Industrialization and the faster pace of technological development could turn out vast arsenals of modern weaponry – including machine guns, aircraft and submarines – to equip these forces. The naval and military spending of the main European powers had doubled in the last two decades of the 19th century, and doubled again in the first decade of the 20th.
By 1914, the leading European powers had formed a series of military alliances. Created as deterrents, to keep the peace and preserve the balance of power, they actually increased the risk of war, because a threat to one posed a threat to all, and the more aggressive members could call the tune. In 1914, as a crisis swelled in the Balkans, Germany and France failed to curb their chief allies, Austria and Russia.
An additional danger was that military planning was entrusted, not to civilian leaders, but to each country’s general staff – men who took it for granted that striking the first blow was likely to be decisive. In the run-up to the First World War, their planning revolved around seizing the initiative in order to dictate the dynamic of events.
‘We want eight, and we won’t wait.’
This slogan emerged in Britain in 1909, in the lead-up to the First World War, at a time when the major powers were competing to build faster and more heavily armed battleships, such as the British Dreadnought launched in 1906