‘If the failed plans of 1914 marked a strategic shift in the conduct of war, the great battles of 1916 marked a tact ical one’. Student: Luke Bundy, War & Society
The conduct of warfare in 1914 was built upon the previous experiences of the European
powers in the nineteenth-century. The war plans and strategies took on an emphatically
offensive, yet clinical, approach. The Schlieffen Plan and Austria- Hungary’s campaign against
Serbia constituted the opening moves in the chess game of 1914. The Entente strategies
enacted in response to those of the Central Powers seemed largely to follow the same ethos
of targeting the weakest member of their coalesced enemies. One must consider the
European General Staffs’ unfamiliarity with the potency of the technology employed in the
War. As observed by General Pierre Ruffey of the French Third Army, assaults failed ‘in the
c onditions that had prevailed for most of the time until now.’ 1 1916’s great battles were
fought with even further developed technology. Strategy was the department of generals in
their ivory command posts, while tactics that of the soldiers and officers in the line of fire.
German strategy to capture Paris and eliminate France’s war effort, using neutral
Belgium as the main channel of attack, was ambitious at best. Firstly, it was a trick pulled
once already, and secondly, it required action against a neutral country. Though the
Germans knew that doing so would bring Britain to France’s aid, they believed they could
defeat both powers in the field before Russia could mobilise its forces against them in the
East. 2 To enact Schlieffen’s plan, of two one -front wars rather than one two-front war when
faced with three enemies, would require near-perfect execution of the plan with utmost
1 Nick Lloyd, The Western Front: A History of the First World War (London: Penguin Books Limited, 2021), p. 27 2 J.C.G. Rohl, ‘Admiral von Muller’s Diary, Dec 8 1912’, in The Kaiser and his Court: Wilhelm II and the Government of Germany (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 162-163
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