Increasingly, intimate military relations were reinforced by the application of powerful financial incentives. The French government focused from 1911 onwards on strengthening Russian offensive capacity and, in 1912-13 on ensuring that Russian deployment plans were directed against Germany rather than Austria, the ostensible opponent in the Balkans. Pages and pages of material describe the action on a disembodied state level, like this: Unfortunately, these feats of compression often result in rather dense, stodgy prose that examines events from a viewpoint that I found far too abstract. It is often elegantly written, and very extensively researched – it's not unusual to check the footnotes and find nearly a dozen different sources adduced to back up the thread of a single paragraph. The Sleepwalkers is the big modern book to examine the question, and it was greeted with adulatory reviews by a historical community that saw in it a long-awaited replacement for Barbara Tuchman's The Guns of August from way back in 1962. So this is the explanation to beat, so far, in my admittedly very limited understanding of the causes of the First World War. Richard Curtis & Ben Elton, Blackadder Goes Forth BALDRICK: So the poor old ostrich died for nothing. You see, there was a tiny flaw in the plan.

BALDRICK: But this is a sort of a war, isn't it, sir?ĬPT.

The idea was to have two vast opposing armies, each acting as the other's deterrent. You see, Baldrick, in order to prevent war in Europe, two superblocs developed: us, the French and the Russians on one side, and the Germans and Austro-Hungary on the other. But the real reason for the whole thing was that it was too much effort not to have a war. BALDRICK: Nah, there was definitely an ostrich involved, sir.ĬPT.

BLACKADDER: …I think you mean it started when the Archduke of Austro-Hungary got shot. I heard that it started when a bloke called Archie Duke shot an ostrich 'cause he was hungry.ĬPT. BLACKADDER: Do you mean, 'How did the war start?' So, what I want to know is: how did we get from the one case of affairs to the other case of affairs?ĬPT. BALDRICK: The way I see it, these days there's a war on, right? and, ages ago, there wasn't a war on, right? So, there must have been a moment when there not being a war on went away, right? and there being a war on came along. In a dugout in northern France, sometime in 1916, three British soldiers try to make sense of one of the most complicated questions of modern history:

The sleepwalkers book christopher clark