The problem was not Germany’s failure to attain victory in 1914 but her eagerness to go to war in the expectation of crushing France and Britain. Instead, if Germany had kept the peace and followed a policy of conciliation, she could have continued to build on the scientific and industrial prowess and commercial wealth that was making her the leading power on the European continent. A powerful but pacific Germany would have achieved far more in the long run than even a victorious Germany in 1914.
Strong demurral w/your assertions.
* Germany was most emphatically not the war monger in 1914. * Keeping the peace was an equally shared responsibility.
* The immediate cause of war was the beyond reckless decision of Czar Nicholas, one of the history’s greatest buffoons, to mobilize and invade East Prussia. Recall that Berlin was less than 100 kl. away
The core catalyst for the Great War was the ancient and enduring enmity between the Gauls and Saxons since antiquity; a reality that Julius Caesar refereed to countless times in his War Dispatches to Rome.
By the end of the 5th century, Clovis had nurtured a sense of nationhood among the Franks which would soon evolve into France under the Capetian Monarchy.
But Germania would remain fractured, as well as a battlefield and highway, from Charlemagne to Napoleon, for another 1000 years.
Then in 1870, a Hohenzollern Prince and a Military Genius seized the moment as Von Bismarck and Von Moltke crushed the French in a matter of months. At the Treaty in the Hall of Mirrors, concluding the Franco-Prussian War, Bismarck stood the preening and strutting French Marshals, while he sat in a chair telling them they would never violate German land again. The French couldn’t bear it, vowing revenge.
As George Kennan astutely asserted in his ‘Fateful Alliance’ ; by 1890, both Bismarck and Moltke the Elder were gone and a feckless Kaiser occupied the throne. Consequently, he allowed Germany’s treaty w/Czarist Russia to lapse, allowing the French to step in. Now Germany faced a possible war on two fronts, always anathema to the General Staff. And so it went.
German eagerness to crush Britain is utter malarkey as they shared both a common Saxon heritage and bloodlines through Victoria. In fact, it was the Tories, the Party of Commerce who beat the war drum, as they feared Germany’s industrial prowess. The ruling Liberals under Asquith were adamantly opposed but in the end, they caved; and for their reckless judgement, never held elective office in Britain again.
So Britain entered a war in had no reason to and for its trouble lost its Empire in the mud of Flanders.
The story is told eloquently by two o/s English scholars; Sir John Keegan, Lecturer at Sandhurst and Niall Ferguson, a world ranking economic historian.