Mitchell Loughlin’s Reviews > The Guns of August > Status Update

Germany now in full panic considers giving France its claimed territory back if they stay out of the war but the leadership sours at the idea of losing power (shot)

In fact after the war an entire book was written describing why they could in fact have turned the troops around.

Meanwhile France knowing there alliance with England was predicated on Germany being the aggressor pulled all
Of there troops back 10 kilometers from the border to make it painfully obvious who fired the first shot. This was a risk due to the attack mindset of the French people

He refused to do so because it took so much planning to pull off his French attack. Basicallyan ego move (shot). He claimed that pulling back at this point would be impossible due to the inability of the train scheduled to be updated at this point. Counterpoint to this his own uncle, a war hero and the reason he rose so far, had designed annual test runs for the train operators to
So just that.

The Germans now freaked out that their threats didn’t work have to pay the tab. They attempt to negotiate there way out of this war by pleading to England who gives them a political answer that Germany misinterpreted as agreement to stay out of the war if Germany doesn’t attack France. In fact they said France or Russia. (Shot)

The Kaiser starts to follow this belief asking the leader to pull back from France

The word of the day is: Incompetence.
Take a shot every time someone basically starts a world war!


Outbreak
Russia who has been threatened by Germany for a long time mobilize there troops to the border. Germany has given them an ultimatum to give up territory and verbally commit to inaction or be invaded. The German army assumed fear of attack would be enough and they could bully there way into more power

There army was under supplied with some not having guns and those with guns have only 800 bullets for the whole war. They could not easily supply there troops because in a defensive mechanism they made there trains operate on wider tracks then the rats of the world so they could not use there own trains to outside of Russia.

It was estimated they could bring 6m fighters albeit rather slowly to the front lines. Compare this against Germans 1.5m moving to France and you can understand the fear. They were however entirely incompetent from a leadership perspective. There czar was purposely uneducated by his father as to not be a threat. There chief of military believed no important development in tech would have change military functions

the Russian steamroller:

Fresh off the back of losing a war to Japan Russia was in rebuilding mode. For a long time the army based promotions of social standing and money rather then merit. This led to the intelligent but lower class soldiers to become frustrated and lazy. In 1909 they fired more generals then was in the entire German army.
Despite this Russia was viewed as an unstoppable first due to its size

Spilled an entire cup of coffee on the rug and my orange chair. Not important to the story but I did spend 30 mins cleaning it before I got to read this morning

These plans were so thorough that they had even planned rest points for soldiers to have coffee breaks along the march. They had supply agreements with France, a plan for how long each unit would be deployed and so on.
The one condition they offered in there involuntary if war was that if France violated the Belgium treaty before Germany they would not assist France.