I'm in Chapter two of Leonhard's Pandora's Box, page 28 of 1087. The
chapter is entitled "Antecedents: Crises and Containment before 1914." Most
interesting (and alarming) is his drawing attention to the sorts of wars
princes engaged in during the period of the monarchies vs. what came later
with democracies. If a prince wanted to go to war with a neighboring
prince, he would raise an army assign a commander and off it would go to do
the prince's bidding. If the commander lost the army, he would not be given
another.
But with the American Civil War all that changed. With everyone a citizen,
the armies that could be raised are only limited by a nation's population.
More soldiers were killed in America's Civil War than in all the subsequent
wars America was engaged in. Grant set the standard for Haig. If you had
more soldiers then you could trade them in battle after battle, confident
that the enemy would run out of them before you did. And Sherman with his
march to the sea demonstrated the effectiveness of destroying an enemy's
resources, the resources he would need to continue fighting.
Princes were indeed involved in WWI's beginning, but they had lost much of
their power. Ordinary people were citizens and had rights. They could also
be drafted into armies. But in 1914 it wasn't just nations that were
contending, it was empires. Britain, in splendid isolation could draw upon
the manpower of an empire larger than anyone else's.
Nevertheless the German's thought they could whip the British and French.
The war degenerated into a trench-warfare stalemate. The Germans decided to
sink the American ships bringing aid to the allies and when they did that
America declared war on Germany. American armies were subsequently
assembled. Initially, Germany wasn't too worried. It would take America a
long time to get their armies to Europe, but when they started arriving . .
. it was sort of like a chess game. The Germans seemed to be doing okay,
but its best thinkers could see several moves ahead and with larger and
larger numbers of Americans arriving, they stood no chance of winning, so
they resigned.
Poorer thinkers later on challenged that decision. Germany wasn't properly
defeated. They resolved to play the game again and this time all the way to
the end.
Leonhard didn't say all the above. I have taken the liberty of reasoning
from what he has said. His book is a bit overwhelming - as overwhelming as
House of Government, but much more interesting in my opinion. I have read
several books about WWI in the past, but have never encountered much of what
Leonhard is presenting . . . in the above primarily the increased death-toll
of war when we moved from monarchies to democracies. . . seems obvious, but
I confess to never having thought of it before.
Lawrence
