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from dozens of hereditary principalities, was the ceaseless ping-ping of rail-building
and welding and industry. How natural it must have seemed to add the rat-a-tat-tat
of a Maxim gun. Crown Prince Wilhelm, the Kaiser’s eldest son, wrote that defensive
thinking was, “utterly foreign to the German spirit.” Bismarck’s “Iron and Blood”
national motto became, finally, personal for many Germans, who were prouder to
leave their universities with a hot-red dueling scar on their faces than a subtle
ownership of Goethe in their hearts.

“During the decades before the First World War,” the political scientist Steven van
Evera has observed, “a phenomenon which may be called a ‘cult of the offensive’
swept through Europe.”225 Wars, it was believed, would run with the same swiftness
of trains or the new industrial sewing machines or steam-fired printing presses. It
was this instinct that led German generals to assure the Kaiser in 1914 that a war
begun in August would be finished by Christmas. English university students
sprinted to enlistment centers in the days after the war began, worried the fight
might end before they tasted blood. French farmers moving from their crops to the
trench lines of Flanders, Russian aristocracy crowding towards the Danube, the
politicians who led them all – they operated, mostly, with this same conviction.
British Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey’s mournful meditation on the evening of
August 3,1914, the first night of the war, was a lonely one: “The lamps are going out
all over Europe,” he said. “We shall not see them lit again in our lifetime.”

The First World War was a kind of engineering tragedy. The disaster had deep roots:
domestic politics, the insecurity of kings, profound colonial greed. But also a
fundamental miscalculation about the nature of war and peace in an age of industry.
Machine guns – and all the tools of industrial war, from gas to battleships – were not
magic tricks of fast victory or permanent peace, as some had thought. A mechanized
modern army wasn’t, as much as it may have seemed in theory or drills or in
midnight massacres in the African bush, some steam-press built for cold rolling the
armies Belgium and Prussia and France. In fact, the weapons encouraged battle as
they piled endlessly in national arsenals. They tickled fears of fast or surprise attack,
even as they gratified that weird continental hunger for violence. Hilare Beloc’s
poetic joke, the sly we’ve got the Maxim, and they’ve not took on an unexpected
character when both sides had ‘em. The machine gun reached the fiery acme of its
purpose not as a spur to end wars altogether, as Gatling once hoped, but rather
when it was married to barbed wire, to shovels and to gas – and then admixed with
the trigger-tugging fear of 20-year-old boys. So: Sixty thousand British casualties in
one day alone, July 1, 1916 at the Somme.

The rhymes changed. Hilare Beloc’s jigs were a distant memory for the starved,
surprised and shocked men in the field. Siegfried Sassoon:

You smug faced crowds, with kindling eye
Who cheer when soldier lads march by,

225 “During the decades”: Steven Van Evera, “Cult of the Offensive and the Origins
of the First World War”, International Security (Vol 9, No 1, Summer 1984) 58

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