Many who lived through the next thirty days of mounting combat, agony, and terror were to remember the sound of endless, repetitious masculine singing as the worst torment of the invasion.

The Naval Minister next challenged the War Minister to a duel, but after fervent efforts by their colleagues to separate and calm the combatants, he embraced Messimy in tears and was persuaded to...

Lanrezac finally spoke. He gave the order for a general retreat. He knew he would be taken for a "catastrophard" who must be got rid of-as indeed he was. His own account tells that he said to one of...

Disdain of the reserves was augmented by the new doctrine of the offensive which, it was felt, could only be properly inculcated in active troops. To perform the irresistible onslaught of the attaque...

Alexander Guchkov, a subsequent Minister of War, testified that he "reached the firm conviction that the war was lost" after Tannenberg. The defeat gave new vigor to the pro-German groups who began...

Fear and horror of the franc-tireur sprang from the German feeling that civil resistance was essentially disorderly. If there has to be a choice between injustice and disorder, said Goethe, the German...

Though a profound student of Clausewitz, Foch did not, like Clausewitz's German successors, believe in a foolproof schedule of battle worked out in advance. Rather he taught the necessity of perpetual...

Having won the Cross of St. George as a dashing young cavalry officer in the war of 1877 against the Turks, Sukhomlinov believed that military knowledge acquired in that campaign was permanent truth....

The cutting off of Russia with all its consequences, the vain and sanguinary tragedy of Gallipoli, the diversion of Allied strength in the campaigns of Mesopotamia, Suez, and Palestine, the ultimate...

For a hundred years the Ottoman Empire, called the "Sick Man" of Europe, had been considered moribund by the hovering European powers who were waiting to fall upon the carcass.

Devout or not, all owned and carried Books of Hours, the characteristic fashionable religious possession of the 14th century noble.

Though writing in 1917, Mann was reflecting 1914, the year that was to be the German 1789, the establishment of the German idea in history, the enthronement of Kultur, the fulfillment of Germany's...

After a last attempted poisoning-this time of Burgundy and Berry-Navarre died in horrid circumstances. Sick and prematurely old at 56, he was tormented by chills and shivering and at doctor's orders...

Where Brooke was embracing cleanness and nobleness, Mann saw a more positive goal. Germans being, he said, the most educated, law-abiding, peace-loving of all peoples, deserved to be the most...

Whatever our lot may be, August 4, 1914, will remain for all eternity one of Germany's greatest days!

He must present Belgium as the cause without hiding France as the basic cause; he must appeal to Britain's honor while making it clear that Britain's interest was the deciding factor; he must stand...

That was the Battle of Mons. As the opening British engagement of what was to become the Great War, it became endowed in retrospect with every quality of greatness and was given a place in the British...

For a knight to ride in a carriage was against the principles of chivalry and he never under any circumstances rode a mare.