![]() Her husband was president of the most important political party in the country, the Radical Party. At the end of July 1914, the French press was far more focused on a domestic scandal – the trial of Henriette Caillaux (1874-1943), the wife of one of the leading politicians of the French Third Republic, which took place from 22 to 29 July. In France, although there had been some evident concern among the public in the weeks before the outbreak of the conflict, the atmosphere was not pro-war, despite the significant hawk-like change to the military service law of the previous year, 1913, which lengthened the period of service from two to three years. This was the context of the images of enthusiastic soldiers leaving for war in 1914 and the trains of mobilised troops covered in bellicose graffiti – nevertheless it is important not to exaggerate this phenomenon these cases were only ever a very small minority of overall troops and populations. This was particularly the case in the three countries which were at the heart of the conflict – the French Republic and the German and Russian empires. It is therefore important to realise that when the threat of war loomed in 1914, the populations of Europe thus did not react in response to what was going to happen – rather, they responded to what they imagined, or what they were capable of imagining, was going to be the likely outcome. This was far from being irrational – indeed, had the German army won the battle of the Marne, which it came very close to doing, this was what might well have happened: in this scenario, the war would have been more or less over on the Western Front and it would not have taken long for it to end on the Eastern Front as well. Before the outbreak of the First World War in 1914, the future belligerents’ plans all envisaged a rapid conflict whose outcome would be decided by one or two decisive large battles. But although this earlier period of warfare lasted cumulatively more than twenty years, it was made up of a series of much shorter individual wars and between them there had also been brief phases of peace. There was an awareness of the earlier Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars, particularly among Europe’s military indeed, the Napoleonic wars received especial attention. The "short war illusion" was, in part, a consequence of the lessons being drawn from history: the most recent war between the major European powers, the Franco-Prussian war of 1870, which remained a relatively fresh memory for the populations of 1914, had only lasted from 19 July 1870 to 29 January 1871, around six months. Western military observers, however, largely ignored the lessons of attrition and the difficulty of carrying out speedy offensives that were evident in the Russo-Japanese and Balkan wars. There were exceptions of course – famously Horatio Herbert Kitchener (1850-1916) as well as Helmuth Karl Bernhard Graf von Moltke (1800-1891) and Friedrich Engels (1820-1895) had envisaged a long war Jan Gotlib Bloch (1836-1902) had predicted that modern war would prove long and an economic catastrophe. ![]() There was little awareness of the terrible effects of modern weapons or the fact that they would result in a long war, although books, articles and newspapers did refer to the negative impact a conflict might have. One simple explanation, of course, was that practically no one, from the ordinary citizen to the heads of government and military generals, imagined or could begin to imagine the reality of the war that would unfold. This article will explore what the reasons for this were. Although this varied greatly from country to country and within populations, it was still the case that, for some, the news of war was regarded positively. Knowing what we do about the nature of the First World War, it is difficult to grasp the fact that the outbreak of the war in 1914 was welcomed by some sectors of public opinion in Europe.
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