Wonder-Weapons - A Means to the End?

Humanity entered the twentieth century armed to the teeth. In Berlin, Paris and St Petersburg, generals and politicians made belligerent speeches. Hundreds of thousands of soldiers, and millions more in the reserves, devoured their words: all they needed was the order to 'march off to glory'. Armament plants issued new rifles, machine guns and artillery pieces, and super-modern dreadnoughts were released from the slips into the sea. War was in the air.

In each European country the general staff totted up the available bayonets and sabres, canons and machine-guns, the numbers of reservists and the stocks of shells and concluded that they could not conceivably lose the coming war. Each had accumulated so many weapons and supplies and trained up so many reservists that victory was assured. At the beginning of the century, only a very few of the most advanced military thinkers understood that the art of waging war had entered a completely blind cul-de-sac.