Alliance automaticity
Timetables and guarantees shortened the diplomatic hour in July 1914.
The Western Front's geography (coal, rail, Channel ports) locked both sides into a short, dense battlefield.
Gallipoli, the Isonzo, Palestine and East Africa had different climates and the same industrial logistics problem: how to supply a mass army far from home.
Principles
Defence stronger than attack
Until late methods caught up, attackers paid more -- a fact, not a slogan.
Economic war
Blockade and finance were grand strategy, not side policy.
Coalition command
Foch's 1918 generalissimo role was political as much as operational.
Peace needs enforcement
The League without the US, and with revisionist powers, could not police the map it drew.
Steps
- Regional crisis
Sarajevo to Austrian ultimatum -- a Balkan war that could have stayed Balkan.
Hindsight is cheap; the files show how narrow the exits were.
- General mobilisation
Russian, German, French and Austrian mobilisations made reversal politically costly.
Mobilisation was not yet shooting, but it was nearly war.
- Failed short war
The Marne and the failure to outflank through Flanders ended the 1914 script.
Plans are not destinies.
- Attrition years
1915-17 offensives sought a break that geography and firepower denied.
Learning was real and expensive.
- New belligerents
Italy (1915), US (1917), and Russia's exit (1918) reset the coalition maths.
Entry and exit both change strategy.
- Armistice politics
Civilian governments sought terms while armies were still in the field.
The clock on 11 November was a political instrument.
Diagrams
A simple who-declared-on-whom timeline -- more useful than a single "war guilt" arrow.
A static line with named salients, showing how little the map moved for three years.
Limits
Civilian counts
Blockade deaths and Ottoman mass killings have wider error bands than British Army rolls.
Eastern Front neglect
English sources still under-describe 1914-17 in Poland and Galicia.
No employment guide
Trench and gas history is not instruction.
1918's combined-arms methods are described as history. They are not a field manual.
The "lions led by donkeys" slogan is a memory war, not a complete operational analysis.