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Long peace erases the fear of war
A century without great-power war
There had been no significant war between great powers for 100 years before 1914, just as there has been none since 1945. Almost no one alive today has experienced one. Plenty of other wars go on, terrible for the people caught in them, but war between great powers happens at a different level.
The Somme numbers
The numbers show the gap. In the first two weeks of the Battle of the Somme in the summer of 1916, as many soldiers were killed as in all the wars fought between 1815, the end of the Napoleonic Wars, and the outbreak of the First World War. People just weren't prepared to think along those lines.
Treating wars as isolated
Before 1914, small conflicts were treated as if they could be kept in isolation. The Balkans were talked about roughly as people once talked about the Middle East: what happens in the Middle East stays in the Middle East. That became less and less true of the Balkans in the years before the war, and it is less and less true today.
Why was the Somme so deadly?
Both armies had machine guns, rapid-firing artillery, and barbed wire, while infantry still crossed open ground on foot. The British opened the battle on 1 July 1916 after a week-long bombardment that left many German defenders alive in deep dugouts. Those defenders came up and manned their machine guns as the British advanced. British casualties on that first day were about 57,000, of whom roughly 19,000 died.
What kept Europe stable after 1815?
After Napoleon's defeat, Britain, Russia, Austria, and Prussia agreed at the Congress of Vienna to restore a balance of power. They kept meeting in conferences, an arrangement later called the Concert of Europe, to settle disputes before they turned into fighting. Conservative monarchs also shared a fear of revolution, which gave them a reason to cooperate. France was brought back into the group at the Congress of Aix-la-Chapelle in 1818.
Why did Europeans expect a short war in 1914?
Prussia's wars of unification in the 1860s and 1870s had been decided quickly. In 1870, the Franco-Prussian War went from declaration on 19 July to the French surrender at Sedan on 1 and 2 September. Military planners in 1914 built their schedules around that kind of swift, decisive campaign. Many soldiers marched off that August expecting to be home by Christmas.
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