To honour the centennial of "The War to End All Wars," (and with thoughts of my Doughboy Grandfather close in mind), I've been inching through Barbara Tuchman's iconic The Guns of August, It's a chronicle of the lead-up to and first month of WWI.
Prior to the war, the great European powers had promised not to pick on little sibling Belgium. Problem was, it was the no-brainer route for a German army intent on invading France. Unsurprisingly, when hostilities again flared, Germany had already developed meticulously-timed plans for cutting through Belgium in six days en route to Paris. (One can only imagine how Microsoft Project would have been abused by Field Marshals von Schlieffen and von Moltke the Younger...) Belgium hadn't really kept up its military in recent decades, so Germany expected that the Belgians would step quietly aside, pacified by assurances that they were only being a little inconvenienced.
One thing that Belgium did have going for it at the war's outset was a ring of twelve forts near Liége. On August 5th, the German assault began. Belgian resistance surpassed even the most pessimistic expectations. The Germans, rather than fall back and regroup, counted on their superiority in numbers, and so sent wave after wave of troops into mostly one-sided carnage. [snark] Because, you know, they had a schedule to keep. Stepping back to think takes too much time. [/snark]
Honestly, I cannot even begin to stretch my brain around what it must have been like to charge machine-gun fire when the wall of bodies was already a meter high. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Multiple parallel universes stuffed wall-to-wall with 24-carat Grade-A Nope.
At which point, I'm afraid that my cynical defences kicked in, and I thought, "Sure, because throwing more bodies at a problem when you're slipping your dates is always the logical response, right?"
Which almost sounds like I'm trivialising, and I most emphatically am not. If anything, it just made me angrier that, even with such brutal Q.E.D examples, the lesson has clearly not been absorbed a century later.
