Richard Rhodes Quote

The end result of the complex organization that was the efficient software of the Great War was the manufacture of corpses. This essentially industrial operation was fantasized by the generals as a strategy of attrition. The British tried to kill Germans, the Germans tried to kill British and French and so on, a strategy so familiar by now that it almost sounds normal. It was not normal in Europe before 1914 and no one in authority expected it to evolve, despite the pioneering lessons of the American Civil War. Once the trenches were in place, the long grave already dug (John Masefield’s bitterly ironic phrase), then the war stalemated and death-making overwhelmed any rational response.379 The war machine, concludes Elliot, rooted in law, organization, production, movement, science, technical ingenuity, with its product of six thousand deaths a day over a period of 1,500 days, was the permanent and realistic factor, impervious to fantasy, only slightly altered by human variation.380 No human institution, Elliot stresses, was sufficiently strong to resist the death machine.381 A new mechanism, the tank, ended the stalemate.