No, I see what you meant, and you've elaborated it nicely. In the conventional space, one sees in Europe in 1914 many of the same preoccupations that came into nuclear strategy in the early to mid Cold War, in a way: the need to have all this tremendously complicated, interlocking machinery awaiting a go command that might be given at any moment, the need to get it all in place and the troops disembarking the trains as quickly as possible to keep the other side from getting the jump in terms of mobilization, etc., etc. Perversely, the added fortifications in the west prove that the enemy is readier there and makes a sudden frontal assault even more necessary.
It raises some interesting questions. The rush to mass slaughter would have been lessened if the generals on one or both sides had understood that there was actually plenty of time because trench lines were pretty static, but then, if they'd understood that, there would have been no cult of the offensive, and hence no rush to war, and possibly this diplomatic crisis would have been resolved the same way a half-dozen others were before it.
But you're also right about how selective our own history can be. The Marne is only, what, a couple days walk from Paris. In hindsight it's obvious that the advance that getting that far was the lucky part and the subsequent retreat and entrenchment was the typical part, but maybe if the Germans had been just a little bit luckier, the "Great War" would have confirmed the theory of the offensive instead of shattered it. But then I guess "if only we'd been just a little bit luckier" can stand in for the entire history of German aggression in the 20th century.