Perhaps the most striking feature of the first months of the war was the
bloody nature of the fighting, far beyond what nineteenth-century European
models had led prewar planners to expect. Heavy artillery, rapid-fire rifles,
and machine guns combined with defensive tools such as barbed wire and
trench fortifications to make combat unimaginably costly.
The generals of course knew the casualty figures. But the public could only
sense the size of the losses. Newspaper reports offered little accurate information.
British war correspondents, for example, in Phillip Knighdey's vivid
description, "protected the high command from criticism, wrote jauntily about
life in the trenches, kept an inspired silence about the slaughter, and allowed
themselves to be absorbed by the propaganda machine." i-+ This pattern
condnued in all countries throughout the war. But in the minds of the public
and military leaders alike, the determination to go on with the war—and
even fight it with larger, better equipped forces—was unchallenged.
World History
