It is forbidden to kill, therefore all murderers are punished unless they kill in large numbers

into the sound of trumpets. Voltaire. Hello and welcome to the When Diplomacy Fails special

on World War I, episode 20.6, 1915.

We've got a lot of ground to cover today, so I suggest we just jump right into it.

I will now take you to the year, 1915.

The winter of 1914 had proved the lengths to which war plans could change.

With the failure of the Schleifen plan, Germany was put in the position of having to defend on the Western Front against a determined Anglo-French force that was growing more and more intimidating by the day,

and having to constantly attack across a huge moving front in the East against a Russian army that seemed unending. In fact, it was almost

a complete reversal of the Schleifen plan, because instead of attacking in the West, Winter

saw the reinforcement of the trenches against the British and French for the purpose of sparing

German soldiers that could be used to attack in the East. As we saw in the last episode, this was because of two factors.

Namely, there's strategic errors of the German High Command, which had seen the German

armies blunder through the disaster of the Marn, but also because that same German

High Command had severely underestimated the ability of Russia to mobilize.

Instead of taking 40 days, Russia took less than 30,

and this, combined with the initial teething problems of the German army in Belgium,

caused the Schlafen plan to fail.

The problem with this was, for the German high command, very little thought

in being given to fighting a war in this way.

France, by the end of 1914, was meant to be defeated,

and Russia was supposed to be facing the full fury of the Austro-German alliance. Britain was

meant to be a non-entity, Italy was meant to be an ally. Serbia and the Balkans had almost

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