To be sure, some military technologies would have advanced considerably in the more than twenty years, but they nonetheless would be recognizable. On the other hand, if a battalion commander from 1918 were to jump forward to a World War II battlefield of 1940 or 1941, he would be able to understand the broad outlines of what was happening. Almost nothing that he knew in 1914 about how to fight a battle would be of much use in 1918. If an infantry battalion commander of August 1914 were to jump ahead a scant four years to August 1918, he would be totally bewildered by what he saw happening on the battlefield around him. With a few significant exceptions, almost everything about how large-scale combat operations are conducted today traces its origins to World War I. The scholarship over the last thirty years has shown that the period from 1914 through 1918 introduced the biggest changes in warfighting tactics and technologies in all human history. The reality is something quite different. Thus, it has become accepted wisdom that World War I has nothing to teach the student of modern war, especially in comparison to World War II, with its fast-moving armored and airborne divisions that are the basic models of military forces today. Both the popular and the scholarly images of that war paint the picture of a four-year long blood bath - a senseless war of attrition conducted by incompetent generals, without a trace of strategic thought or tactical innovation.
After all, much of the historiography of the last hundred years has given World War I a very bad reputation. “Why bother studying World War I? What’s the point?” This seemingly reasonable question is asked frequently by contemporary students and quite often by seasoned scholars.
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