The Making of Wartime Strategy

In France, socialist ministers harbored lingering suspicions of clerical and possibly Bonapartist officers. In Britain, liberals attacked what they saw as an excessive focus on the Western Front over the Eastern. Both sets of politicians could refer to recent events to buttress their fears. What worried France before 1914 was a military coup but drove clashes between soldiers and statesmen in both countries after 1914. Here, more united than divided the two parties, for all the fire and brimstone generated at the time and subsequently.