The Shape of Wars to Come
During the opening years of the twentieth century, writes I.F. Clarke, many fantastic forecasts of the coming World War aroused widespread interest and alarm.
The first battles in the great war, long foretold by Bismarck and Moltke, had already been reported and described at the beginning of the twentieth century.
According to one German writer, Karl Eisenhart, the Great War began on the grey morning of a nameless day in an unknown month when swift German cruisers steamed out from North Sea ports.
Their task, as Eisenhart explained in Die Abrechnung mit England in 1900, was to destroy British commerce on the high seas—the indispensable preliminary to the final defeat of the United Kingdom.
But that was only one version of the future, for in the years of 1900 and 1901 British, French, and German writers between them produced at least a dozen different accounts of the Great War. In 1900, for example, Colonel Maude described the initial success of a French invasion in The new Battle of Dorking.
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