A Pour le Coeuresque question

I was thinking about this while reading PlC, and didn't want to clog P's excellent timeline.

Anywho, the basic POD in that is "French Army better prepared for WWI". Was there anybody who remotely predicted what WWI would be like? I know for WWII there was Guderian, and DeGalle, and [that british guy whose name I forget] all of whom had at least adequate conceptions of what WWII was going to look like. Whereas, for WWI, the only one I can think of was (er, some guy again) who wrote the book explaining that what with the interconnectedness of the 1910s world and the new mass armies, any war would be absolutely economically devastating, but even then he came to the wrong conclusion (War is now to horrible to contemplate! as opposed to the historically-attested People are absolute f***ing idiots). Oh, and HGWells, a bit, even if it was a tankwank.

So - was there anyone who had an idea of what WWI would be like? And, a related topic: if somebody published a Turtledovesque light fictionalization of WWI in, say, 1903, what would people have thought of it?
 

MrP

Banned
For Britain, Kitchener knew the war was going to last several years and consume millions of men, but he doesn't seem to have had a tactical appreciation prior to the war. But a massive pre-war militarisation of the Home Islands is pretty much out of the question. There were some forward thinking types in Russia, but the system tended to squash them a bit, even though/because of (?) the significant reforms post-1905. The French military conception (from about the turn of the century, IIRC) was that the Germans would outflank French forces both at the tactical and strategic level, and that this should be prevented by an assault on the enemy's main body of men, thus isolating his flanking units. It rather flumped.
 

maverick

Banned
I remember a Sherlock Holmes story in which Holmes captures a German agent before the war, in any case, the minister that hires Detective from Baker Street warns of a war that could result in the death of as much as 100,000 men and the loss of millions of pounds:rolleyes::p

Weren't most people always with the "over by Christmas" crap, in most wars?
 

MrP

Banned
I remember a Sherlock Holmes story in which Holmes captures a German agent before the war, in any case, the minister that hires Detective from Baker Street warns of a war that could result in the death of as much as 100,000 men and the loss of millions of pounds:rolleyes::p

Weren't most people always with the "over by Christmas" crap, in most wars?

With WWI they based it on the destructive power of modern weaponry, which they felt would wipe out armies in an initial titanic confrontation. Much of the original BEF was gone by late '14, for instance. They also believed there wouldn't be time to get replacements to the front.

Is that the Bruce-Partington Plans? The only other that comes to mind is The War Service of Sherlock Holmes, but that's of 1917 vintage, I think.
 
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