They had not figured out a way to put machine guns on that the bullets wouldn’t hit the propeller and then come back and kill the pilot. The pilots literally had to carry pistols with them at the very beginning. Remember, the last thing he said supposedly in his life was, “Let the last soldier touch the English Channel and then come down and hit Paris.” But they turned down before that, and the first airplanes are used as reconnaissance planes. Schlieffen would have gone crazy about this. Basically, it’s possible to argue that the Battle of the Marne saves Paris and saves France. Also, some more are headed off to the eastern front, because they start to realize that the Russians are mobilizing more rapidly than they thought they could. Unlike the French, they did not have military conscription.īasically, to make a long story short, in part because Germany, as France, as everybody was worried about the home front, basically what happens is they hurt their chances of pulling this off by moving some divisions to Alsace to try to blunt the force there. But it’s very small and they don’t have conscription until late in the war. What they called the British Expeditionary Force does arrive and takes its place next to the French. The Germans were counting on the fact that it would take Britain a very, very long time to raise an army, not a navy but an army of any size. The point about the invasion of Belgium was that it brought Britain into the war. It didn’t work out the way Schlieffen wanted it to. Now - comment faire ça? Qu’est ce qu’on va faire? - so, just a few things at the beginning that are obvious. To make a nice transition to his lecture, I’m going to end with something that he wrote about how reality and art came together in a terrifying way in 1918. Jay Winter is going to talk about essentially the Great War in modern memory.
I assume that you guys all saw Paths of Glory, so I’m going to talk about the mutinies in a while. Professor John Merriman: We’re going to talk about the war today.
The Failure of the Schlieffen Plan: The Battle of the Marne European Civilization, 1648-1945 HIST 202 - Lecture 17 - War in the TrenchesĬhapter 1.