The German victories of 1866–70 had opened a new chapter in the military as well as the political history of Europe. The German triumphs were generally seen to have been due to two factors, one strategic and one tactical. The first had been Germany’s capacity to deploy very much larger forces in the field than could her adversaries, and this was itself due to two causes. One was the development of railways and telegraphs, which made possible the rapid deployment to the theatre of war of unprecedented numbers of men. The other was the introduction of universal peacetime conscription, which ensured not only that these numbers were available but that they had been fully trained and could be rapidly mobilized when required. Such armies—and by 1871 that of the Germans already numbered over a million—required an unprecedented degree of organization, which was the task of a general staff whose head became the effective commander- in-chief of the entire force. It also called for a devolution of command that imposed new responsibilities on middle-ranking and junior officers. Battles could no longer be fought and decided under the eye of a single commanding general. They might extend, as they did in the Russo- Japanese War, over many scores of miles. Once he had deployed his forces on the battlefield, the commander-in-chief could only sit in his headquarters many miles behind the front line and hope for the best.

This extension of the front was increased by the second factor, the development of long-range weapons. The introduction of breech-loading and rifled firearms for infantry increased both range and accuracy to an extent that would have made frontal attacks out of the question if simultaneous developments in artillery had not provided the firepower to support them. Even since 1870 ranges had increased enormously. By 1900 all European armies were equipped with infantry rifles sighted up to 1,000 yards and lethally accurate at half that range. Field guns were now ranged up to five miles, and capable of firing up to twenty rounds a minute. Heavy artillery, hitherto used only for siege work, was being rendered mobile by rail and road, and could engage targets at a range of over twenty-five miles. Armies would thus come under fire long before they could even see their enemy, let alone attack his positions.

In a pioneer work of operational analysis, La Guerre future, published in 1899, the Polish writer Ivan Bloch calculated that in wars fought with such weapons the offensive would in future be impossible. Battles would quickly degenerate into bloody deadlock. The cost of maintaining such huge armies in the field would be prohibitive. The economies of the belligerent powers would be overstrained, and the consequent hardships imposed on the civilian population would everywhere lead to the revolutions that the possessing classes throughout Europe were beginning to dread. So accurately did this foretell the course and outcome of the First World War that subsequent historians have wondered why more account of it was not taken at the time [1]. But within a few years of its publication two wars were fought that showed that, although the new weapons certainly inflicted terrible losses, decisive battles could still be fought and won. In South Africa in 1899–1902, in spite of the skill and courage of the Boer riflemen, the British eventually won the war and pacified the country—very largely through the use of cavalry whose demise military reformers had been foreseeing for many years. More significantly, in 1904–5, in a war fought on both sides with the latest modern weapons, the Japanese had been able, by a combination of skilful infantry and artillery tactics and the suicidal courage of their troops, to defeat the Russians in battle after battle and compel them to sue for peace. The lesson learned by European armies was that victory was still possible for armies equipped with up-to-date weapons and whose soldiers were not afraid to die. But a further lesson was that the victory had to be quick. A campaign lasting little more than a year had resulted in revolution in Russia and brought Japan to the brink of economic collapse. Bloch’s forecast that no nation could for long sustain a war fought, in the words of the German Chief of Staff Alfred von Schlieffen, by ‘armies of millions of men costing milliards of marks’, was taken to heart. The powers of Europe all prepared to fight a short war because they could not realistically contemplate fighting a long one; and the only way to keep the war short was by taking the offensive.

[1]  Bloch survived long enough after publishing his theory to turn his analytical talents to investigating the institutional barriers which prevented the theory’s adoption by the military establishment. He appears to have concluded that the military had to be sidestepped, by a more direct appeal to voters.

Contemporary theory treats Bloch as the Clausewitz of the early 1900s. One recent review in the journal War in History is especially interested to study the interaction between Bloch’s theory and the military professionals of the time. In short, it finds that they tended to dismiss Bloch, on the basis that, while his ‘mathematics’ might be correct, his overall message ran the risk of being bad for morale.