In 1909 Norman Angell published his polemic The Great Illusion, in which he argued that the increasingly international character of trade, commerce and finance had rendered wars between sovereign states not merely unprofitable, but positively harmful to victors and vanquished alike. A decade earlier had appeared a remarkable six-volume treatise entitled The Future of War in its Technical, Economic and Political Relations by Ivan S. Bloch, a Warsaw banker. Bloch began on the sound tactical principle that firepower was bestowing ever greater strength to the defensive; so that in future wars infantry must take refuge in trenches or suffer fearful carnage. He envisaged wars of the future as enormous sieges, with famine as the final arbiter. Bloch, like Angell, concluded that war had become impossible—except at the price of suicide—since even the winners would suffer the destruction of their resources and risk social disintegration.

These and other warning voices made little impact on either soldiers or statesmen in the decade before 1914. The consolidation of the rival alliances, a succession of international crises, and the increasing likelihood of an explosion in the Balkans, were but the surface symptoms of a profound malaise. Politically these years provide a terrible indictment of the self-defeating quest for national security through secret diplomacy and armed might. Psychologically, too, nations were being conditioned for war: by propaganda; by the spurious application of the Darwinian struggle to the human species; by bitter class divisions; and not least by self-delusion as to the nature of war.