August of 1914 saw tens of thousands or men marching off to war, amid cheering throngs, knowing that their brave soldiers would be returning home soon, victorious in what would be called the Great World War. The French managed to stall the invading Germans short of Paris, and the armies dug in for what became four bloody years of stalemated trench warfare. On the eastern front, the German army under General Paul von Hindenburg and Erich Ludendorff used brilliant tactics and railroading to first engage and destroy the Imperial Russian Second Army and a few days later, the First Army.

Machine guns made a real appearance on the battlefields, and tanks came later. There were air battles, but the airplanes of the time were few and flimsy, and not able to make the deep bombing runs into enemy territory that were seen twenty years later in World War II.

The quick war that the cheering crowds expected did not happen. The thrones of the European aristocracy were overthrown in Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Russia, as four years of death and destruction on the battlefield, and the privations at home drove countries into revolution. Germany was defeated, but when the war ended, German troops were still deep into French territory. It was simply that Germany had reached the end of its strength, the abdication of the Kaiser was forced, and the country had no strength to fight on. Industrial warfare had bled half of a generation to death in devastated France, but nevertheless had left Germany itself mostly untouched.

Just fifteen years after the end of World War I, Adolf Hitler and the Nazis were able to come to power, democratically elected, and running in part on the theory that Germany had not really lost, but had been stabbed in the back by Communists, pacifists, and, of course, the Jews. Under the Nazis, Germany rebuilt its military, and prepared for a second war.

The final result was the same, on paper, with Germany defeated, but in the real world, was very different. Mostly untouched in the first World War, Germany had been bombed to rubble in the second, as newer technology developed the long-range bombers which attacked not the Wehrmacht, but the civilian industry and infrastructure which supported the military at the fronts. France, Germany, and the Soviet Union were heavily damaged, and the United Kingdom saw domestic damage as well, though not as much. Italy had been thoroughly bombed.

The United States? We were virtually untouched, safe behind thousands of miles of deep oceans, and it was American industry which was able to produce the machines which were fed into the maw of war.

World War II ended 80 years ago, and the men who fought in it are mostly gone; any surviving soldiers are nearing, if not over, 100 years of age.

Which brings me to the utter idiocy of the tweet screen captured to the right. In threatening to send longer-range missiles to Ukraine, has Friedrich Merz forgotten what happened to Germany in the last war? Yes, the Federal Republic has weapons today that the Third Reich lacked, but so does Russia. The slow, propeller-driven bombers of World War II, many of which had been shot down, have been replaced by jet aircraft, unmanned drones, intercontinental-range bombers, and ballistic missiles traveling many times the speed of sound. The candidate — Mr Merz has not yet been elected — seems to have forgotten that while Germany has ballistic missiles, so does Russia, and, unlike Germany, the Russians have the capability to mount nuclear warheads on their missiles.

In France, President Emmanuel Macron has not ruled out sending troops to Ukraine to fight the Russkies. This could be chalked up to attempting to create strategic uncertainty for Russia, but what got to me were the comments on the tweet. So many people, including Americans, were cheering this stuff, blithely ignoring the potential start of World War III.

Patterico commenter Kevin M wrote:

We should not be negotiating with ourselves before we negotiate with Putin. We should open with “full Russian withdrawal and NATO membership.” And yes, give Ukraine what they’ve been asking for. Maybe even Western troops now that Putin has added Nork soldiers.

Jim Miller began with a non-starter:

Here’s how we should start out our negotiations with Putin: Demand that he turn himself over to an international court to be tried for war crimes.

Most of Patterico’s commenters are intelligent folks, and many are attorneys.

A Twit on Twitter wrote:

Now we are talking a language the Russians understand…

Either withdraw from Ukraine territory or get bombed into dust and scrap metal….no discussion needed…

These are the people who would have been lining the wide boulevards in 1914, wildly cheering the soldiers marching off to war.

Well, war is a very messy business, and they rarely go as planned. World War I certainly didn’t, and who could have predicted that as many as 80 million people — we’ll never know the precise number — were killed in World War II? Did American involvement in Vietnam or Iraq or Afghanistan go the way we expected? Russia’s wars in Afghanistan and Ukraine certainly didn’t go as planned! When you add the possibility of nuclear weapons being used, wars not going as planned could wind up destroying entire nations.

Perhaps former and future President Donald Trump can somehow negotiate an end to the war in Ukraine. He wants to try, but the most he can actually force is a cut-off of American funds and supplies; he can’t stop France or Germany or the United Kingdom from sending money and war materiel to Ukraine, nor can he stop North Korea from sending more troops to help Russia. But, in the end, other than being willing to negotiate, we should keep our country out of it!