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The generals of 1914 knew as little as the peoples about what lay ahead. By a triumph of indoctrination, the French army, from marshal to private, was imbued with the spirit of the offensive, which was just Danton's toujours de I'audace expressed in human flesh. Bands playing, the French soldiers, fine targets in red-and-blue uniforms, hurled themselves on the German lines in Lorraine. Machine guns mowed them down. The New England-born inventor, Hiram Maxim, had overruled Danton. The German generals were surprised, too. Their Schlieffen plan, a wheel through Belgium toward Paris, was expected to knock out France in six weeks. It swung short of the objective. Trenches were dug from Switzerland to the sea, and a four-year siege of war which neither side sought or foresaw developed.
Out of the horror and futility of the trenches was born a new feeling that war in all circumstances is futile and evil. This pacifism suffused the minds of a whole generation in the West; it was to ease the path for Hitler's and Mussolini's early aggressions. The casualties of World War I trench warfare (4,000,000 died on the Western Front) were only a part of the horror. The rats, the lice, the slime were utter degradation to the most cleanly and comfortably reared generation of men the world had ever known. Former wars had been fought by professional soldiers or by men whose hazardous and squalid peacetime lives almost equaled the hazards and squalor of war. The generation of World War I thought that it had progressed beyond the old dangers. The pacifist poet, Siegfried Sassoon, understood that the horror lay in a shocking contrast:
/ see them in foul dugouts, gnawed by rats,
And in the ruined trenches, lashed with rain,
Dreaming of things they did with balls and bats,
And mocked by hopeless longing to regain
Bank-holidays, and picture-shows, and spats,
And going to the office in the train.-
Churchill looked upon the Western Front as an immense trap. The military men, he said, "had no policy but the policy of exhaustion." He emphatically agreed with France's Georges Clemenceau — that "war is too serious a matter to be left to the generals."
Uncle to Tanks & Socialism.
Early in the war, Churchill suggested "interposing a thin plate of steel" to protect troops from machine-gun fire. He ordered experimental tanks in 1915. The paternity of the tank is disputed; Churchill is at least its uncle.
His other major effort to end the Western Front deadlock was the Dardanelles campaign, later known by a tragic name — Gallipoli. He wanted to force the Dardanelles, knock Turkey out of the war, tip the Balkan states to the side of the Allies and open a supply line through the Black Sea to exhausted Russia. Gallipoli was bungled by lack of coordination between the services and a piecemeal, too-little,