The Guns of August

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The Guns of August (1962) (published in the UK as August 1914) is a volume of history by Barbara W. Tuchman. It is centered on the first month of World War I. After introductory chapters, Tuchman describes in great detail the opening events of the conflict. Its focus then becomes a military history of the contestants, chiefly the great powers.

All page numbers from the mass market paperback edition published by Ballantine Books/Presidio Press in August 2004, ISBN 0-345-47609-3
All italics and ellipses (except as noted) are as in the book. Bold face has been added for emphasis.

Quotes[edit]

  • The larger purpose in Barbara Tuchman’s research was to find out, simply, what really happened and, as best she could, how it actually felt for the people present. She had a little use for systems or systematizer’s in history and quoted approvingly an anonymous reviewer in the Times Literary Supplement who said, “The historian who puts his system first can hardly escape the heresy of preferring the facts which suit his system best.”
  • The writing process, she said, was “laborious, slow, often painful, sometimes agony. It requires rearrangement, revision, adding, cutting, rewriting. But it brings a sense of excitement, almost of rapture, a moment on Olympus.”
    • Forward by Robert K. Massie (p. xii)
  • The muffled tongue of Big Ben tolled nine by the clock as the cortege left the palace, but on history’s clock it was sunset, and the sun of the old world was setting in a dying blaze of splendor never to be seen again.
    • Chapter 1, “A Funeral” (p. 1)
  • Envy of the older nations gnawed at him. He complained to Theodore Roosevelt that the English nobility on continental tours never visited Berlin but always went to Paris.
    • Chapter 1, “A Funeral” (p. 7)

Part 1: Plans[edit]

  • Europe was a heap of swords piled as delicately as jackstraws; one could not be pulled out without moving the others.
    • Chapter 2, “Let the Last Man on the Right Brush the Channel with His Sleeve” (p. 22)
  • Nothing so comforts the military mind as the maxim of a great but dead general.
    • Chapter 2, “Let the Last Man on the Right Brush the Channel with His Sleeve” (p. 23)
  • Thus the Germans came to Belgium. Decisive battle dictated envelopment, and envelopment dictated the use of Belgian territory. The German general staff pronounced it a military necessity; Kaiser and Chancellor accepted it with more or less equanimity. Whether it was advisable, whether it was even expedient in view of the probable effect on the world opinion, especially on neutral opinion, was irrelevant. That it seemed necessary to the triumph of German arms was the only criterion. Germany had imbibed from 1870 the lesson that arms and war were the sole source of German greatness. They had been taught by Field Marshal von der Goltz, in his book The Nation in Arms, that “We have won our position through the sharpness of our sword, not through the sharpness of our mind.” The decision to violate Belgium neutrality followed easily.
    • Chapter 2, “Let the Last Man on the Right Brush the Channel with His Sleeve” (p. 26)
  • Character is fate, the Greeks believed. A hundred years of German philosophy went into the making of this decision in which the seed of self-destruction lay embedded, waiting for its hour. The voice was Schlieffen’s, but the hand was the hand of Fichte who saw the German people chosen by Providence to occupy the supreme place in the history of the universe, of Hegel who saw them leading the world to a glorious destiny of compulsory Kultur, of Nietzsche who told them that Supermen were above ordinary controls, of Treitschke who set the increase of power as the highest moral duty of the state, of the whole German people, who called their temporal ruler the “All-Highest.” What made the Schlieffen plan was not Clausewitz and the Battle of Cannae, but the body of accumulated egoism which suckled the German people and created a nation fed on “the desperate delusion of the will that deems itself absolute.”
    • Chapter 2, “Let the Last Man on the Right Brush the Channel with His Sleeve” (p. 26)
  • Dead battles, like dead generals, hold the military mind in their dead grip, and Germans, no less than other peoples, prepare for the last war.
    • Chapter 2, “Let the Last Man on the Right Brush the Channel with His Sleeve” (p. 27)
  • Besides the two Moltkes, one dead and the other infirm of purpose, some military strategists in other countries glimpsed the possibility of prolonged war, but all preferred to believe, along with the bankers and industrialists, that because of the dislocation of economic life a general European war could not last longer than three or four months. One constant among the elements of 1914—as of any era—was the disposition of everyone on all sides not to prepare for the harder alternative, not to act upon what they suspected to be true.
    • Chapter 2, “Let the Last Man on the Right Brush the Channel with His Sleeve” (p. 27)
  • Schlieffen’s plan was maintained and Moltke consoled himself with the thought, as he said in 1913, that “We must put aside all commonplaces as to the responsibility of the aggressor.…Success alone justifies war.”
    • Chapter 2, “Let the Last Man on the Right Brush the Channel with His Sleeve” (p. 32)
  • The plan of campaign was as rigid and complete as the blueprint for a battleship. Heeding Clausewitz’s warning that military plans which leave no room for the unexpected can lead to disaster, the Germans with infinite care had attempted to provide for every contingency. Their staff officers, trained at maneuvers and at war-college desks to supply the correct solution for any given set of circumstances, were expected to cope with the unexpected. Against that elusive, that mocking and perilous quantity, every precaution had been taken except one—flexibility.
    • Chapter 2, “Let the Last Man on the Right Brush the Channel with His Sleeve” (p. 32)
  • Though a profound student of Clausewitz, Foch did not, like Clausewitz’s German successors, believe in a foolproof schedule of battle worked out in advance. Rather he taught the necessity of perpetual adaptability and improvisation to fit circumstances. “Regulations,” he would say, “are all very well for drill but in the hour of danger they are no more use.… You have to learn to think.” To think meant to give room for freedom of initiative, for the imponderable to win over the material, for will to demonstrate its power over circumstance.
    • Chapter 3, “The Shadow of Sedan” (p. 39)
  • Battles are beyond everything else struggles of morale. Defeat is inevitable as soon as the hope of conquering ceases to exist. Success comes not to him who has suffered the least but to him whose will is firmest and morale strongest.
    • Chapter 3, “The Shadow of Sedan” (p. 41; quoted from the 1913 Field Regulations of the French Army)
  • Over the years, while French military philosophy had changed, French geography had not.…While French history and development after the turn of the century fixed her mind upon the offensive, her geography still required a strategy of the defensive.
    • Chapter 3, “The Shadow of Sedan” (p. 41; ellipsis represents elision of two sentences of details)
  • To be right and overruled is not forgiven to persons in responsible positions, and Michel duly paid for his clairvoyance.
    • Chapter 3, “The Shadow of Sedan” (p. 45)
  • The Belgians were discovered to be adamant in the strict observance of their own neutrality. When the British attaché asked about possible joint arrangements for British landings in Belgium, on the premise of a prior German violation, he was informed that the British would have to wait until their military assistance was requested. The British minister, making his own inquiries, was told that if British troops landed before a German invasion or without a formal Belgian request, the Belgians would open fire.
    Belgium’s rigid purity confirmed what the British never tired of repeating to the French—that everything depended upon the Germans violating Belgian neutrality first.
    • Chapter 4, “A Single British Soldier…” (p. 65)
  • Although the defects of the Russian Army were notorious, although the Russian winter, not the Russian Army, had turned Napoleon back from Moscow, although it had been defeated on its own soil by the French and British in the Crimea, although the Turks in 1877 had outfought it at the siege of Plevna and only succumbed later to overwhelming numbers, although the Japanese had outfought it in Manchuria, a myth of its invincibility prevailed.
    • Chapter 5, “The Russian Steam Roller” (p. 67)
  • Systematic attention to detail was not a notable characteristic of the Russian army.
    • Chapter 5, “The Russian Steam Roller” (p. 70)
  • “This insane regime,” its ablest defender, Count Witte, the premiere of 1903–06, called it; “this tangle of cowardice, blindness, craftiness, and stupidity.” The regime was ruled from the top by a sovereign who had but one idea of government—to preserve intact the absolute monarchy bequeathed to him by his father—and who, lacking the intellect, energy, or training for his job, fell back on personal favorites, whim, simple mulishness, and other devices of the empty-headed autocrat.
    • Chapter 5, “The Russian Steam Roller” (p. 71)
  • Insofar as readiness for war was concerned, the regime was personified by its minister for war, General Sukhomlinov, an artful, indolent, pleasure-loving, chubby little man in his sixties of whom his colleague, Foreign Minister Sazonov, said, “it was very difficult to make him work but to get him to tell the truth was well nigh impossible.” Having won the Cross of St. George as a dashing young cavalry officer in the war of 1877 against the Turks, Sukhomlinov believed that military knowledge acquired in that campaign was permanent truth. As Minister of War he scolded a meeting of Staff College instructors for interest in such “innovations” as the factor of firepower against the saber, lance and the bayonet charge. He could not hear the phrase “modern war,” he said, without a sense of annoyance. “As war was, so it has remained…all these things are merely vicious innovations. Look at me, for instance; I have not read a military manual for the last twenty-five years.” In 1913 he dismissed five instructors of the College who persisted in preaching the vicious heresy of “fire tactics.”
    • Chapter 5, “The Russian Steam Roller” (p. 73)

Part 2: Outbreak[edit]

  • Face to face no longer with the specter but the reality of a two-front war, the Kaiser was as close to the “sick Tom-cat” mood as he thought the Russians were. More cosmopolitan and more timid than the archetype Prussian, he had never actually wanted a general war. He wanted greater power, greater prestige, above all more authority in the world’s affairs for Germany but he preferred to obtain them by frightening rather than by fighting other nations. He wanted the gladiator’s rewards without the battle, and whenever the prospect of battle came too close, as at Algeciras and Agadir, he shrank.
    • Chapter 6, “August 1: Berlin” (p. 89)
  • Moltke closed upon that rigid phrase, the basis for every major German mistake, the phrase that launched the invasion of Belgium and the submarine war against the United States, the inevitable phrase when military plans dictate policy—“and once settled it cannot be altered.”
    • Chapter 6, “August 1: Berlin” (p. 94)
  • Honor wears different coats to different eyes.
    • Chapter 7, “August 1: Paris and London” (p. 114)
  • In 1914 “glory” was a word spoken without embarrassment, and honor a familiar concept that people believed in.
    • Chapter 8, “Ultimatum in Brussels” (p. 122)
  • No more distressing moment can ever face a British government than that which requires it to come to a hard and fast and specific decision.
    • Chapter 9 “Home Before the Leaves Fall” (p. 133)
  • Clausewitz, a dead Prussian, and Norman Angell, a living if misunderstood professor, had combined to fasten the short-war concept upon the European mind. Quick, decisive victory was the German orthodoxy; the economic impossibility of a long war was everybody’s orthodoxy.
    • Chapter 9 “Home Before the Leaves Fall” (p. 141)
  • In Whitehall that evening, Sir Edward Grey, standing with a friend at the window as the street lamps below were being lit, made the remark that has since epitomized the hour: “The lamps are going out all over Europe; we shall not see them lit again in our lifetime.”
    • Chapter 9 “Home Before the Leaves Fall” (pp. 145-146)

Part 3: Battle[edit]

  • Turkey at the time of Sarajevo had many enemies and no allies because no one considered her worth an alliance. For a hundred years the Ottoman Empire, called the “Sick Man” of Europe, had been considered moribund by the hovering European powers who were waiting to fall upon the carcass. But year after year the fabulous invalid refused to die, still grasping in decrepit hands the keys to immense possessions.
    • Chapter 10, “Goeben…An Enemy Then Flying” (p. 161)
  • Turkey had one asset of inestimable value—her geographical position at the junction of the paths of empire. For that reason England had been for a hundred years Turkey’s traditional protector, but the truth was that England no longer took Turkey seriously. After a century of supporting the Sultan against all comers because she preferred a weak, debilitated, and therefore malleable despot astride her Road to India, England was at last beginning to tire of the fetters that bound her to what Winston Churchill amicably called “scandalous, crumbling, decrepit, penniless Turkey.” The Turkish reputation for misrule, corruption, and cruelty had been a stench in the nostrils of Europe for a long time.
    • Chapter 10, “Goeben…An Enemy Then Flying” (p. 163)
  • If there was one thing characteristic of British naval thinking prior to the outbreak of war, it was the tendency to credit the German Navy with far greater audacity and willingness to take risks against all odds than either the British themselves would have showed or than the Germans in fact did show when the test came.
    • Chapter 10, “Goeben…An Enemy Then Flying” (p. 167)
  • Churchill also later explained that his order was not intended “as a veto upon British ships ever engaging superior forces however needful the occasion.” If it was not intended as a veto, then it must have been intended for commanders to interpret as they saw fit, which brings the matter to that melting point of warfare—the temperament of the individual commander.
    • Chapter 10, “Goeben…An Enemy Then Flying” (p. 169)
  • When the moment of live ammunition approaches, the moment to which all his professional training has been directed, when the lives of men under him, the issue of the combat, even the fate of a campaign may depend upon his decision at a given moment, what happens inside the heart and vitals of a commander? Some are made bold by the moment, some irresolute, some carefully judicious, some paralyzed and powerless to act.
    • Chapter 10, “Goeben…An Enemy Then Flying” (p. 169)
  • According to the Kriegsbrauch, or Conduct of War manual issued by the German general staff, “the putting on of enemy uniforms and the use of enemy or neutral flags or insignia with the aim of deception are declared permissible.” As the official embodiment of German thinking on these matters, the Kriegsbrauch was considered to supersede Germany’s signature on the Hague Convention of which article 23 prohibited the use of disguise in enemy colors.
    • Chapter 10, “Goeben…An Enemy Then Flying” (p. 175)
  • General Gallieni, dining in civilian clothes at a small café in Paris on August 9, overheard an editor of Le Temps at the next table say to a companion, “I can tell you that General Gallieni has just entered Colmar with 30,000 men.” Leaning over to his friend, Gallieni said quietly, “That is how history is written.”
    • Chapter 11, “Liège and Alsace” (pp. 221-222)
  • Within the army, field officers despised Staff officers as “having the brains of canaries and the manners of Potsdam,” but both groups were as one in their distaste for interference by civilian ministers who were known as “the frocks.” The civil arm in its turn referred to the military as “the boneheads.”
  • Neither, thought Haig, “are at all fitted for the appointments which they now hold.” Sir John, he told a fellow officer, would not listen to Murray but “will rely on Wilson which is far worse.” Wilson was not a soldier but “a politician,” a word which, Haig explained, was “synonymous with crooked dealing and wrong values.”
    • Chapter 12, “BEF to the Continent” (pp. 238-239)
  • The cult of arrogance practiced by Prussian officers affected no one more painfully than themselves and their allies.
    • Chapter 13, “Sambre et Meuse” (p. 252)
  • That vexing problem of war presented by the refusal of the enemy to behave as expected in his own best interest beset them.
    • Chapter 13, “Sambre et Meuse” (p. 253)
  • But once divinity of doctrine has been questioned there is no return to perfect faith.
    • Chapter 13, “Sambre et Meuse” (p. 253)
  • Berthelot said to him comfortingly, “If the Germans commit the imprudence of an enveloping maneuver through northern Belgium, so much the better! The more men they have on their right wing, the easier it will be for us to break through their center.”
    • Chapter 13, “Sambre et Meuse” (p. 264)
  • The Germans had worked it out that the logical place for the British to land would be at the ports nearest to the front in Belgium, and von Kluck’s cavalry reconnaissance, with that marvelous human capacity to see what you expect to see even if it is not there, duly reported the British to be disembarking at Ostend, Calais, and Dunkirk on August 13. This would have brought them across von Kluck’s front at almost any moment. In fact, of course, they were not there at all but were landing further down the coast at Boulogne, Rouen, and Havre.
    • Chapter 13, “Sambre et Meuse” (p. 265)
  • General von Hausen, commanding the Third Army, found, like von Kluck, that the “perfidious” conduct of the Belgians in “multiplying obstacles” in his path called for reprisals “of the utmost rigor without an instant’s hesitation.” These were to include “the arrest as hostages of notables such as estate-owners, mayors, and priests, the burning of houses and farms and the execution of persons caught in acts of hostility.” Hausen’s army were Saxons whose name in Belgium became synonymous with “savage.” Hausen himself could not get over the “hostility of the Belgian people.” To discover “how we are hated” was a constant amazement to him. He complained bitterly of the attitude of the D’Eggremont family in whose luxurious château of forty rooms, with greenhouses, gardens, and stable for fifty horses, he was billeted for one night. The elderly Count went around “with his fists clenched in his pockets”; the two sons absented themselves from the dinner table; the father came late to dinner and refused to talk or even respond to questions, and continued in this unpleasant attitude in spite of Hausen’s gracious forbearance in ordering his military police not to confiscate the Chinese and Japanese weapons collected by Count D’Eggremont during his diplomatic service in the Orient. It was a most distressing experience.
    • Chapter 13, “Sambre et Meuse” (pp. 267-268)
  • Officers from St. Cyr went into battle wearing white-plumed shakos and white gloves; it was considered “chic” to die in white gloves.
  • Lanrezac finally spoke. He gave the order for a general retreat. He knew he would be taken for a “catastrophard” who must be got rid of—as indeed he was. His own account tells that he said to one of his officers: “We have been beaten but the evil is reparable. As long as the Fifth Army lives, France is not lost.” Although the remark has the ring of memoirs written after the event, it may well have been spoken. Fateful moments tend to evoke grandeur of speech, especially in French.
    • Chapter 14, “Debacle: Lorraine, Ardennes, Charleroi, Mons” (p. 300)
  • By his silence Joffre ratified the decision; he did not forgive it.
    • Chapter 14, “Debacle: Lorraine, Ardennes, Charleroi, Mons” (p. 300)
  • Human beings, like plans, prove fallible in the presence of those ingredients that are missing in maneuvers—danger, death, and live ammunition.
    • Chapter 14, “Debacle: Lorraine, Ardennes, Charleroi, Mons” (p. 309)
  • Elan had not been enough.
    • Chapter 14, “Debacle: Lorraine, Ardennes, Charleroi, Mons” (p. 311)
  • Difficulties of organization were immense; the essence of the problem, as the Grand Duke once confessed to Poincaré, was that in an empire as vast as Russia when an order was given no one was ever sure whether it had been delivered.
    • Chapter 15, “The Cossacks Are Coming!” (p. 315)
  • Precision in timing was not in any case a notable Russian virtue.
    • Chapter 15, “The Cossacks Are Coming!” (p. 319)
  • Anxiety for East Prussia became acute when on August 15 Japan declared for the Allies, freeing large numbers of Russian forces. In making or keeping friends, a task that forever eluded it, German diplomacy had failed again.
    • Chapter 15, “The Cossacks Are Coming!” (p. 321)
  • Moltke was aghast. This was the result of leaving that fat idiot in command of the Eighth Army, and of his own ill-considered last words to him.
    • Chapter 15, “The Cossacks Are Coming!” (p. 332)
  • Far to the rear a sense of disaster pervaded the Russian High Command. As early as August 24 Sukhomlinov, the War Minister who had not bothered to build arms factories because he did not believe in firepower, wrote General Yanushkevitch, the beardless Chief of Staff: “In God’s name, issue orders for gathering up the rifles. We have sent 150,000 to the Serbs, our reserves are nearly used up and factory production is feeble.”
  • When the Battle of the Frontiers ended, the war had been in progress for twenty days and during that time had created passions, attitudes, ideas, and issues, both among belligerents and watching neutrals, which determined its future course and the course of history since. The world that used to be and the ideas that shaped it disappeared too, like the wraith of Verhaeren’s former self, down the corridors of August and the months that followed. Those deterrents—the brotherhood of socialists, the interlocking of finance, commerce, and other economic factors—which had been expected to make war impossible failed to function when the time came. Nationhood, like a wild gust of wind, arose and swept them aside.
    • Chapter 17, “The Flames of Louvain” (pp. 368-369)
  • Germans felt similar emotions. The war was to be, wrote Thomas Mann, “a purification, a liberation, an enormous hope. The victory of Germany will be a victory of soul over numbers. The German soul,” he explained, “is opposed to the pacifist ideal of civilization for is not peace an element of civil corruption?”
    • Chapter 17, “The Flames of Louvain” (p. 369)
  • Where Brooke was embracing cleanness and nobleness, Mann saw a more positive goal. Germans being, he said, the most educated, law-abiding, peace-loving of all peoples, deserved to be the most powerful, to dominate, to establish a “German peace” out of “what is being called with every possible justification the German war.” Though writing in 1917, Mann was reflecting 1914, the year that was to be the German 1789, the establishment of the German idea in history, the enthronement of Kultur, the fulfillment of Germany’s historic mission. In August, sitting at a café in w:Aachen, a German scientist said to the American journalist Irwin Cobb: “We Germans are the most industrious, the most earnest, the best educated race in Europe. Russia stands for reaction, England for selfishness and perfidy, France for decadence, Germany for progress. German Kultur will enlighten the world and after this war there will never be another.”
    • Chapter 17, “The Flames of Louvain” (pp. 369-370)
  • No longer the prewar mischief maker and saber rattler, he was now depicted as a dark, satanic tyrant, breathing cruelty and malignancy, expressing brutality in every line. The change began in August and progressed from Bridges’ cool statement, “There was no hatred of Germany,” to that of Stephen McKenna, who wrote in 1921, “Among those who remember, the name of a German stinks and the presence of a German is an outrage.” No pseudo-heroic super-patriot but a sober, thoughtful schoolteacher whose memoirs are a social document of the time, McKenna recorded a change of sentiment that was to prevent any negotiated settlement and keep the fighting going until total victory. What wrought the change was what happened to Belgium.
    The turn of events in Belgium was a product of the German theory of terror. Clausewitz had prescribed terror as the proper method to shorten war, his whole theory of war being based on the necessity of making it short, sharp, and decisive. The civil population must not be exempted from war’s effects but must be made to feel its pressure and be forced by the severest measures to compel their leaders to make peace. As the object of war was to disarm the enemy, “we must place him in a situation in which continuing the war is more oppressive to him than surrender.” This seemingly sound proposition fitted into the scientific theory of war which throughout the nineteenth century it had been the best intellectual endeavor of the German General Staff to construct. It had already been put into practice in 1870 when French resistance spring up after Sedan. The ferocity of German reprisal at that time in the form of executions of prisoners and civilians on charges of franc-tireur warfare startled a world agape with admiration at Prussia’s marvelous six-week victory. Suddenly it became aware of the beast beneath the German skin. Although 1870 proved the corollary of the theory and practice of terror, that it deepens antagonism, stimulates resistance, and ends by lengthening war, the Germans remained wedded to it. As Shaw said, they were a people with a contempt for common sense.
    • Chapter 17, “The Flames of Louvain” (pp. 372-373)
  • “Major von Kleist gave orders that a man or, if no man was available, a woman, be taken from every household as a hostage.” Through some peculiar failure of the system, the greater the terror, the more terror seemed to be necessary.
    • Chapter 17, “The Flames of Louvain” (p. 374)
  • The Germans were obsessively concerned about violations of international law. They succeeded in overlooking the violation created by their presence in Belgium in favor of the violation committed, as they saw it, by Belgians resisting their presence. With a sigh of long-tried patience, Abbé Wetterlé, Alsatian delegate to the Reichstag, once confessed, “To a mind formed in the Latin school, the German mentality is difficult to comprehend.”
    • Chapter 17, “The Flames of Louvain” (pp. 375-376)
  • The German obsession had two parts: that Belgian resistance was illegal and that it was organized from “above” by the Belgian government or by burgomasters, priests, and other persons who could be classified as “above.” Together the two parts established the corollary: that German reprisals were righteous and legal, regardless of degree. The shooting of a single hostage or the massacre of 612 and the razing of a town were alike to be charged to the Belgian government—this was the refrain of every German from Hausen after Dinant to the Kaiser after Louvain.
    • Chapter 17, “The Flames of Louvain” (p. 376)
  • Fear and horror of the franc-tireur sprang from the German feeling that civilian resistance was essentially disorderly. If there has to be a choice between injustice and disorder, said Goethe, the German prefers injustice. Schooled in a state in which the relation of the subject to the sovereign has no basis other than obedience, he is unable to understand a state organized upon any other foundation, and when he enters one is inspired by an intense uneasiness. Comfortable only in the presence of authority, he regards the civilian sniper as something particularly sinister. To the western mind the franc-tireur is a hero; to the German he is a heretic who threatens the existence of the state.
    • Chapter 17, “The Flames of Louvain” (p. 377)
  • An officer in charge in one street watched gloomily, smoking a cigar. He was rabid against the Belgians, and kept repeating to Gibson: “We shall wipe it out, not one stone will stand upon another! Kein stein auf einander!—not one, I tell you. We will teach them to respect Germany. For generations people will come here to see what we have done!” It was the German way of making themselves memorable.
    • Chapter 17, “The Flames of Louvain” (p. 380)
  • Why did the Germans do it? people asked all over the world. “Are you descendants of Goethe or of Attila the Hun?”
    • Chapter 17, “The Flames of Louvain” (p. 381)
  • King Albert in conversation with the French Minister thought the mainspring was the German sense of inferiority and jealousy: “These people are envious, unbalanced and ill-tempered. The burned the Library of Louvain simply because it was unique and universally admired”—in other words, a barbarian’s gesture of anger against civilized things. Valid in part, this explanation overlooked the deliberate use of terror as prescribed by the Kriegsbrauch, “War cannot be conducted merely against the combatants of an enemy state but must seek to destroy the total material and intellectual (geistig) resources of the enemy.” To the world it remained the gesture of a barbarian. The gesture that was intended by the Germans to frighten the world—to induce submission—instead convinced large numbers of people that here was an enemy with whom there could be no settlement and no compromise.
    • Chapter 17, “The Flames of Louvain” (p. 382)
  • Thereafter issues hardened. The more the Allies declared their purpose to be the defeat of German militarism and the Hohenzollerns, the more Germany declared her undying oath not to lay down arms short of total victory. In reply to President Wilson’s offer to mediate, Bethmann-Hollweg said the Pact of London forced Germany to fight to the limit of her endurance, and therefore Germany would make no proposals as basis for a negotiated peace. The Allies took the same stand. In this position both sides were to remain clamped throughout the war. The deeper both belligerents sank into war and the more lives and treasure they spent, the more determined they became to emerge with some compensating gain.
    • Chapter 17, “The Flames of Louvain” (p. 383)
  • Risk was the least favorite concept of the British admiralty in 1914.
    • Chapter 18, “Blue Water, Blockade, and the Great Neutral” (p. 386)
  • “I need no Chief,” said the Kaiser; “I can do this for myself.”
    • Chapter 18, “Blue Water, Blockade, and the Great Neutral” (p. 393)
  • Arguments can always be found to turn desire into policy.
    • Chapter 18, “Blue Water, Blockade, and the Great Neutral” (p. 394)
  • On August 20 the Cabinet issued an Order in Council declaring that henceforth Britain would regard conditional contraband as subject to capture if it was consigned to the enemy or “an agent of the enemy” or if its ultimate destination was hostile. Proof of destination was to depend not as heretofore on bills of lading but—in a phrase of matchless elasticity—on “any sufficient evidence.”
    • Chapter 18, “Blue Water, Blockade, and the Great Neutral” (p. 397)
  • The Prime Minister was not the only person unconcerned with odds and ends of this kind. When a German official, foreseeing the change to a long war of attrition, presented Moltke with a memorandum on the need for an Economic General Staff, Moltke replied, “Don’t bother me with economics—I am busy conducting a war.”
    • Chapter 18, “Blue Water, Blockade, and the Great Neutral” (p. 398)
  • To Wilson neutrality was the opposite of isolationism. He wanted to keep out of war in order to play a larger, not a lesser, part in world affairs. He wanted the “great permanent glory” for himself as well as for his country, and he realized he could win it only if he kept America out of the quarrel so that he could act as impartial arbiter.
    • Chapter 18, “Blue Water, Blockade, and the Great Neutral” (p. 400)
  • Eventually, the United States became the larder, arsenal, and bank of the Allies, and acquired a direct interest in Allied victory that was to bemuse the post-war apostles of economic determinism for a long time.
    • Chapter 18, “Blue Water, Blockade, and the Great Neutral” (p. 401)
  • Hausen himself, whose chief concern, second only to his reverence for titles, was a passionate attention to the amenities offered by each night’s billets, was equally annoyed. On August 27, his first night in France, no château was available for himself and the Crown Prince of Saxony who accompanied him. They had to sleep in the house of a sous-préfet which had been left in complete disorder; “even the beds had not been made!” The following night was worse: he had to endure quarters in the house of a M. Chopin, a peasant! The dinner was meager, the lodgings “not spacious,” and the staff had to accommodate itself in the nearby rectory whose curé had gone to war. His old mother, who looked like a witch, hung around and “wished us all at the devil.” Red streaks in the sky showed that Rocroi, through which his troops had just passed, was in flames. Happily the following night was spent in the beautifully furnished home of a wealthy French industrialist who was “absent.” Here the only discomfort suffered by Hausen was the sight of a wall covered by espaliered pear trees heavy with fruit that was “unfortunately not completely ripe.”
    • Chapter 19, “Retreat” (pp. 430-431)
  • On the same day, the British chiefs were hurrying the BEF southward with such urgency that the soldiers were deprived of the rest they needed far more than they needed distance from the enemy. On that day, August 28, a day when von Kluck’s columns gave them no trouble, Sir John French and Wilson were in such anxiety to hasten the retreat that they ordered transport wagons to “throw overboard all ammunition and other impediments not absolutely required” and carry men instead. Discarding ammunition meant abandoning further battle. As the BEF was not fighting on British soil, its Commander was prepared to pull his forces out of the line regardless of the effect of withdrawal upon his ally. The French Army had lost the opening battle and was in a serious, even desperate, situation in which every division counted to prevent defeat. But it was neither broken through nor enveloped by the enemy; it was fighting hard, and Joffre was exhibiting every intention of fighting further. Nevertheless, Sir John French, succumbing to the belief that the danger was mortal, had determined that the BEF must be preserved from being involved in a French defeat.
    • Chapter 19, “Retreat” (p. 441)
  • [In Joffre’s eyes] Ruffey appeared nervous, excitable, and “imaginative to an excessive degree.” As Colonel Tanant, his Chief of Operations, said, he was very clever and full of a thousand ideas of which one was magnificent but the question was which.
    • Chapter 20, “The Front is Paris” (p. 460)
  • Except for the regular army, all was improvisation and, during the first weeks, before the Amiens dispatch, almost a holiday mood. Up to then the truth of the German advance was concealed by—to use Mr. Asquith’s exquisite phrase—“patriotic reticence.” The fighting had been presented to the British public—as to the French—as a series of German defeats in which the enemy unaccountably moved from Belgium to France and appeared each day on the map at places farther forward.
    • Chapter 20, “The Front is Paris” (p. 462)
  • In the sudden and dreadful realization that the enemy was winning the war, people, searching for hope, seized upon a tale that had cropped up within the last few days and turned it into a national hallucination.
    • Chapter 20, “The Front is Paris” (p. 463)
  • Under the German system—in contrast to the French—Kluck as commander in the field was allowed at the widest possible latitude for independent decision. Prepared by indoctrination, map exercises, and war games to find the correct solution of a given military problem, the German general was expected automatically to reach it when required.
    • Chapter 21, “Von Kluck’s Turn” (p. 474)
  • In the midst of war and crisis nothing is as clear or as certain as it appears in hindsight.
    • Chapter 21, “Von Kluck’s Turn” (p. 485)
  • With few personal ideas of his own, Joffre was adept at taking advice, and submitted more or less consciously to the reigning doctrinaires of the Operations Bureau. They formed what a French military critic called “a church outside which there was no salvation and which could never pardon those who revealed the falsity of its doctrine.” Lanrezac’s sin was in having been right, all too vocally. He had been right from the beginning about the fatal underestimation of the German right wing as a result of which a fair part of France was now under the German boot. His decision to break off battle at Charleroi when threatened with double envelopment by Bülow’s and Hausen’s armies had saved the French left wing.
    • Chapter 22, “Gentlemen, We Will Fight on the Marne” (p. 495)
  • The enemy was considered beaten, and any evidence to the contrary was unwelcome.
    • Chapter 22, “Gentlemen, We Will Fight on the Marne” (p. 498)
  • Moltke, unlike Joffre, may have had no confidence in his own star but neither did he have the veil that confidence can sometimes draw before the eyes, and so he saw things without illusion.
    • Chapter 22, “Gentlemen, We Will Fight on the Marne” (p. 499)
  • Gallieni would not talk to anyone less than Joffre and Joffre would not come to the phone. He had an aversion to the instrument and used to pretend he “did not understand the mechanism.” His real reason was that, like all men in high position, he had an eye on history and was afraid that things said over the telephone would be taken down without his being able to control the record.
    • Chapter 22, “Gentlemen, We Will Fight on the Marne” (p. 501)
  • That was all; the time for splendor was passed. It did not shout “Forward!” or summon men to glory. After the first thirty days of war in 1914, there was a premonition that little glory lay ahead.
    • Chapter 22, “Gentlemen, We Will Fight on the Marne” (p. 517)
  • After it, with the advent of winter, came the slow deadly sinking into the stalemate of trench warfare. Running from Switzerland to the Channel like a gangrenous wound across French and Belgian territory, the trenches determined the war of position and attrition, the brutal, mud-filled, murderous insanity known as the Western Front that was to last for four more years.
    • Afterword (p. 522)
  • It was an error that could never be repaired. Failure of Plan 17 was as fatal as failure of the Schlieffen plan, and together they produced a deadlock on the Western Front. Sucking up lives at a rate of 5,000 and sometimes 50,000 a day, absorbing munitions, energy, money, brains, and trained men, the Western Front ate up Allied war resources and predetermined the failure of back-door efforts like that of the Dardanelles which might otherwise have shortened the war. The deadlock, fixed by the failures of the first month, determined the future course of the war and, as a result, the terms of the peace, the shape of the interwar period, and the conditions of the Second Round.
    • Afterword (p. 523)
  • Men could not sustain a war of such magnitude and pain without hope—the hope that its very enormity would ensure that it could never happen again and the hope that when somehow it had been fought through to a resolution, the foundations of a better-ordered world would have been laid.
    • Afterword (p. 523)
  • When at last it was over, the war had many diverse results and one dominant one transcending all others: disillusion.
    • Afterword (p. 523)
  • The Battle of the Marne was one of the decisive battles of the world not because it determined that Germany would ultimately lose or the Allies ultimately win the war but because it determined that the war would go on. There was no looking back, Joffre told the soldiers on the eve. Afterward there was no turning back. The nations were caught in a trap, a trap made during the first thirty days out of battles that failed to be decisive, a trap from which there was, and has been, no exit.
    • Afterword (p. 524)
  • Through this forest of special pleading the historian gropes his way, trying to recapture the truth of past events and find out “what really happened.” He discovers that truth is subjective and separate, made up of little bits seen, experienced, and recorded by different people. It is like a design seen through a kaleidoscope; when the cylinder is shaken the countless colored fragments form a new picture. Yet they are the same fragments that made a different picture a moment earlier. This is the problem inherent in the records left by actors in past events. That famous goal, “wie es wirklich war,” is never wholly within our grasp.
    • Sources (p. 525)

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