This book is the result of a research project conducted under the guidance of the distinguished military historian Stig Förster. It consists of three separate essays, by three different scholars, on how European military officers in the decades prior to World War I tried to come to terms with the enormous economic, technological, and socio-cultural changes they were living through, and to imagine how these would affect the conduct of future wars. One essay, by Andreas Rose of the Rheinische-Friedrich University in Bonn, is devoted to Great Britain; a second, by Adrian Wettstein of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, covers France; the third, on Germany, is by Markus Pöhlmann of the Bundeswehr's Center for Military History und Social Sciences in Potsdam. This summary of the contents immediately highlights one of the major flaws of an otherwise excellent book: the omission of Austria-Hungary and Russia. In his introduction, Förster notes that they were indeed included in the original project, but that the articles did not make it into the publication. In any event, the authors wish to find out if those who had to plan for and then fight World War I knew what they were getting themselves and their countrymen into. By and large, it appears, they did not. But the reasons for this are complex, the authors show, and neither wholesale stupidity nor deliberate insularity are among them.

The main sources used by all three authors are periodicals by and for professional military officers—for example, the Revue Militaire Générale in France, the Militär-Wochenblatt in Germany, and the Journal of the Royal United Service Institution in Britain, among many others. Their reading and analysis of hundreds, perhaps even thousands, of pages in such journals allows the authors to establish conclusively that, contrary to the popular image of European militaries on the eve of the Great War as hopelessly under the influence of ignorant and reactionary officers, professionals in all three countries not only took a lively and keen interest in the wider technological, political, and social world they inhabited, but also discussed at length how the changes in that world might affect warfare. Unfortunately, these discussions tended to remain both fragmented among the different branches of the military and highly focused on technical details within those branches (comparisons of rates of reload among various weapons, for example, or discussions about whether troops should advance in columns or dispersed). This fragmentation and narrow focus prevented officers from transforming their insights into a comprehensive view of what it all might add up to should a general war in Europe break out.

One of the major debates carried on at the time in these publications revolved around the question of how both technology and the new mass armies arising all over the continent might affect the relationship between offensive and defensive infantry operations. The three authors’ analyses of this debate in their respective countries of study provide illuminating insight into a question that has troubled historians (and not only historians) for decades: why did the commanders in the war fail to perceive what seems obvious in retrospect—namely, that making men charge headlong into machine gun, rifle, and artillery fire could only lead to the wholesale slaughter of the attacking forces? Once again, the authors dispense with the idea that this “strategy” was rooted in sheer ignorance. Quite the opposite: it was partly the result of an attempt to learn and apply the “lessons” of the Russo-Japanese War of 1905, a conflict widely perceived as a case study of what a war between powers fully equipped with modern military equipment would be like. Whereas the Second Boer War (1899–1902) had caused unease throughout European military circles because it seemed to show that massed attacks against well-concealed and well-armed defensive positions were hopeless—even when the attackers had overwhelming numerical superiority—the Russo-Japanese War appeared to indicate just the opposite. In the battles at Port Arthur, for example, Japanese infantry had indeed managed to storm well-defended Russian positions, though at horrific cost. The “lesson” seemed to be that frontal assaults against well-defended positions could indeed work. All that was needed was enthusiasm, discipline, and a willingness to pay a very high price in casualties. The belief in the power of the offensive was therefore neither “irrational” nor the product of simple feeblemindedness, but rather (as so many miseries in warfare often are) of an attempt to learn and apply lessons from one war to another.

Several potential points of further transnational comparison are of particular interest. One, for example, is the doctrine that was developed within the British army to fight so-called small wars, or colonial engagements against irregular forces. The principles of British warfare against restive “natives” is most readily associated with the army officer Charles Callwell and his 1896 book, Small Wars: Their Principles and Practice. Seeking to distill the experience of colonial warfare and produce usable lessons from it, Callwell's manual recommended, among other things, the complete destruction of villages and farms, as well as the “great slaughter” of “irregular warriors.” According to Isabell Hull and her influential arguments about the supposedly unique destructiveness of German military institutions and military culture (Absolute Destruction: Military Culture and the Practices of War in Imperial Germany [2005]), it would appear that colonial warfare itself produced such trends, and that they were present in all the forces that fought cruel “small wars” in Africa. In addition, students of German history—in which Britain still tends to figure, either implicitly or explicitly, as a foil against which Germany's supposed historical deformities and pathologies are measured—might be surprised to discover how thoroughly racialist and Social Darwinist ideology had permeated the British military establishment by the early twentieth century.

Rose, Wettstein, and Pöhlmann write with a certain sympathy for their subjects who, living in a time of unprecedented social and scientific change, proved no more able to predict the future than anyone else has at any other time. Still, they insist that more military officers could and should have been able to think through the broader implications of their narrow technical debates over manpower, troop formations, and rates of fire; that they should have been able to assemble the pieces into a whole suggesting the horrors that would ensue should the European powers go to war with each other. Indeed, some of them did indeed see glimmers of what was to come—but they saw them as through a glass darkly. Had they been able to see more clearly, would there have been less reckless decision-making in the summer of 1914? This is the crucial but unanswerable question that hangs so heavily over this fine study.