Th. has absolutely nothing to say about WWI trench warfare tactics, but everything about the psychology of the people who even after four years of it wanted still more of it, worked towards getting it, and did get it eventually.
Ahh, okay, here lies the misunderstanding. My point wass a little bit more subtle:
Trench warfare wasn´t a [totally] nihilistic, random experience of slaughter and gore, a continous massacre. As such it was painted by several folks, thereby deluding the military truth. That is my point. There was tactics, skill & planning, freedom on the small unit level in many instances. And much more on the Imperial German side than on the others. Success and survival were also a function of effort (apart from random death) in the above factors.
This was mirrored to great effect by WWII. One factor keeping the Wehrmacht togethter till the very last days wasn´t fanaticism [which was rather a destructive force], but constant tactical offensive operations coupled with local successes that were dependant on effort, training, ingenuity etc.
The Wehrmacht was the ultimate Luhmannian socio-technocratic engine, born from the enlightened prussian military tradition. It also was the most 'humane' army of the second world war [for it´s members only, of course! Burning down Russian villages plus inhabitants was no problem].
This is the true [surpassing cthuloid] horror, that so many avoid.
In essence, many soldiers [and definitely not only the Freikorps types, including MANY liberals in every meaning of that word] had the impressions the were actually DOING something to make the bad times go away, in both wars, at least on the German side. Compare that to Vietnam, were there was widescale disintegration of discipline and unit cohesion, because of...[insert ongoing debate]...and the lack of feeling of having a stake or actually accomplishing anything. Also you must see that the whole male German population was in both wars, not only the Freikorps-types (who went to the SA to beat up GERMANS exactly as Theweleit etc. postulates).
It´s a very important thing to understand, and I feel too many have not grasped that. Creveld scratched the surface of it, but it goes deeper. French officers still occasionaly beat up their undrelings. Since Old Prussia, even touching an underling wasn´t allowed. Being in a functioning frontline formation bears no similarity to beat up and hunt/shoot helpless peopl etc..
The German Armies through it´s ingenious/devillish system could turn every sensitive, pacifistic piano player with loving mom and dad and wife into a functioning tank hunter and close combat specialist [who still hated killing, maybe Helmut Schmidt is an example], whereas the murder gangs and SA types were self recruiting. Don´t mix up the two, or you´ll miss something that´s crucial to the 20th century.
It seems to me a battlefield is a strange kind of zone, in which a huge number of events unfolds so rapidly and haphazardly that they look like strategy only in retrospect.
It's almost as if all you can do (not always but very often) is send in a rilly large number of well-trained soldiers and reliable materiel in there, pray for good weather, and hope for the best.
It´s a continuum. Clausewitz was at Borodino and uses it as a great example of the strategy and tactics at the generals disposal. For every era of war it´s different, and in fact a thing which greatly interests me for modern times. For Napoleonic battles Clausewitz explains the fighting was a very gradual process. A division would fight some hours before any result would show. Thus his great emphasis on culmination points, retreat times, reserves and such. In fact, Napoleonic times were ones of rather great tactical and strategic richness, but not for the individual soldier. For WWI it was the other way around! [my argument]. And WWII saw great tactical AND strategic richness on nearly every level.
Other eras that lack stuff like the reserve or zweites treffen, there was a pre battle plan and a "Go!". Delbrück wonderully tracks the tactical and strategic richness or poverty of different eras through time.
