100 Years Ago Were There No Cassandra's Offering Unheeded Warnings?

[sandyRoe]

The military brass would have been full of confidence, despite the fact that they were more used to shooting at the 'Fuzzy Wuzzy' with machine guns than facing an equally well-armed foe.
Politicians seemed keen for blood,too.

[Svejk]

there's always cassandras. Was doing nothing an option, even with the benefit of hindsight?

[jim360]

I think there were some people who knew what might be coming but there wasn't really any idea what to do about it. Plenty of different ideas were tried. Some of them even worked, up to a point.

[sandyRoe]

I don't know. But 'jaw jaw is better than war war'. It might have been avoided.

[Svejk]

and I wouldn't call the boers fuzzy-wuzzy's, lol.

[jim360]

I don't think it could have been. It would have required a complete change in thinking from pretty much all sides at the same time.

[sandyRoe]

No. They don't like it...
I was thinking of Kitchener in the Sudan.

[Nibble]

There were if you lived here....

http://www.gcu.ac.uk/radicalglasgow/chapters/ww1.html

[sandyRoe]

An interesting link, Nibble. TY.

[Svejk]

Talking of Kitchener. He was a bit of a Cassandra. He warned that the war would be total and last years when others envisaged a few weeks jaunt.

[stuey]

It seems that at least one German could see what lay ahead: On 9 November 1911, August Bebel, the Marxist politician who was one of the founders of the Social Democratic Party, rose in the Reichstag and made this speech, warning about the route down which Germany was hurtling: "There will be a catastrophe. Sixteen to 18 million men, the flower of different nations, will march against each other, equipped with lethal weapons.”
"I am convinced," he went on, "that this great march will be followed by the great collapse."
At which point, laughter broke out in the chamber. Bebel picked up: "All right, you have laughed about it, but it will come. What will be the result? After this war, we will have mass bankruptcy, mass misery, mass unemployment and great famine."

From an article in BBC Magazine dated Jan 7, 2014

[wolf63]

Is this post totally in code or a foreign language?

Who the flux is Cassandra?

I think that I am grumpier than usual today - it must be my hormones.

W☺lf

[stuey]

"A common version of her [Cassandra's] story is that Apollo gave her the power of prophecy in order to seduce her, but when she refused him, he gave her the curse of never being believed."

[Barks]

Haig, despite his later image as the archetypal butcher of the Western Front, was under no illusions that it would all be over by Christmas and believed it would last several years and would require a much bigger army than the comparatively tiny BEF.

[stuey]

Two interesting books regarding WWI are "The Guns of August" by Barbara Tuchman, and the more humorous, yet factual, "The Mimmi and Toutou Go Forth" by Giles Fonden.

[stuey]

"Foden", not "Fonden",

[stuey]

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-28609442

[sandyRoe]

Would the rush to war be as hurried if the most senior politicians were expected to be in the vanguard?

[stuey]

Today's date, August 2nd, one hundred years ago.
http://blog.oup.com/2014/08/2-august-1914-luxembourg-british-cabinet-demonstration/