particular. And although the principal German strategic motive was defensive, not
aggressive, the former required behaviour of the latter character. In 1914, Germany went
to war out of fear, not ambition, let alone overconfidence, but an aggressive Germany
still had to be stopped, no matter what its motives. The Allies achieved that end, albeit at
dreadful cost, in over four years of ever more total warfare.
It cannot be denied that the devastation and costs of the war mortgaged the peace that
followed. However, it would be unhistorical, and also implausible, to assert that World
War II was the necessary, inevitable, consequence of World War I. The character, manner
of conclusion and results of 1914–1 8 did contain some potentially lethal enabling factors
for a return match, but whether the enabling consequences of that war would wreak fatal
damage upon the European order in the 1920s and 1930s depended critically on the
dynamic political context. When one searches for the fuel and the matches that produced
World War II, one must look beyond the Great War, vitally important though it certainly
was as a contributory factor.
The third popular myth holds that the war was waged with near-unbelievable military
incompetence. As proof of this conviction, casualty figures typically are cited to pre-empt
contrary argument. Of all the myths about the Great War, this is the most obviously
unsound and the easiest to demolish. In the first place, the charge of exceptional military
incompetence fails the test of plausibility. Is it likely, one must ask, that a whole cohort
of general officers, embracing all great power belligerents, would be almost uniformly
unfit for high command? If outstanding performance by military commanders of all
nationalities was in short supply from 1914–1 8 , it is rather more likely that some powerful
systemic inhibitors of military genius were at work. It is not too hard to locate them. They
include the technical difficulties, even impossibility, of real-time command, communi-
cations and control once battle was joined; the lack of means for tactical and operational
mobility in, through and out of the battle zone; the high force-to-space ratios on the
restricted geography of the Western Front, which was the only possible theatre of final
decision; initially the universal lack of experience in the waging of modern warfare; and,
last but not least, a military context that mandated attrition sharply limited the scope for
demonstrating flair in generalship.
Naturally, military commanders varied in their abilities, and they ranged, as they do
in armies at all times, from the incompetent to the exceptionally gifted. There is no
good reason to believe that the distribution of military competence in the armies of
1914–1 8 was worse than in other periods of great and protracted conflict. Competence
in generalship can be assessed only in its historical context. The relevant question, there-
fore, is how well or poorly did generals and their troopsperform, given the conditions
with which they had to cope and the tasks they could not avoid? The main, unavoidable,
task for British and French generals was to find a way to penetrate a German defensive
zone that could be 6 to 8 miles deep and which had no flanks to turn. Hopes for a dramatic
break-in, breakthrough and subsequent break-out persisted in a few quarters, with
Sir Douglas Haig especially, longer than they should have done. Such an unrealistic
aspiration had the deadly consequence of dispersing unduly the all-important weight of
artillery fire. However, by late 1917 and in 191 8 , military commanders on both sides had
solved the problems of penetration. Everyone understood and, with variable skill,
practised a combined-arms style of combat which was all but guaranteed to make limited
territorial gains, even against the deep and flexible defence system that the Germans had
80 War, peace and international relations