One of the defining aspects of the first world war is that, like today, technology advanced to meet current needs.  That was definitely the case in a time when cars were still not prevalent, horses were still used in combat, and things like machine guns and submarines were experimental and new. ​The last two chapters of Hew Strachan's The First World War reminded me a bit of the Borg in Star Trek:  The Next Generation.  I was reminded of the manner in which the Borg collective adapted when attacked.  In response, the crew of the Enterprise had to discover ways to adapt as well.  One example from the book involved the deliver of chemicals to inflict pain on the enemy.  German officer, Rudolf Binding seemed proud with his army's gas delivery:

...Our guns bombarded empty trenches; our gas-shells gassed empty artillery positions; only in little hidden folds in the ground, sparely distributed, lay machine gun posts, like lice in the seams and folds of a garment, to give the attacking force a warm reception... The ability to adapt in a dangerous situation was and is always important, affecting both the offensive and the defensive war. ...Once armies had learnt countermeasures, gas was not a big killer in the First World War.  However, gas shells meant that it could be used with precision.  Bruchmüller fired tear-gas shells at the same time as phosgene, forcing enemy gun crews to take off their gas masks, to relieve the irritation to their eyes, and so expose their lungs...

Harry Truman's WWI gas mask

On explosion they burst into millions of splinters, which flew out horizontally and caused hundreds of casualties.

...The biggest intellectual shift in making war between 1914 and 1918 was that the combined-arms battle was planned around the capabilities of the guns rather than of the infantry.  On 20 November 1917 the British had attacked at Cambrai with 378 tanks; they achieved complete surprise, penetrating up to 4,000 years on a six-mile front...​By November the Royal Artillery had perfected the techniques of predicted fire.  It used microphones to record from different points the low-frequency sound waves following the firing of a gun in order to take a cross-bearing and locate the position of an enemy battery.  Unlike aerial observation or the visual spotting of gun flashes, both also methods of immense value in identifying targets, sound-ranging could be used in bad visibility.  Consequently, artillery could register its guns in advance of an attack without the preliminary bombardment that had squandered surprise in the past, particularly when the tanks could themselves take on the tasks of crushing wire and destroying enemy machine gun nests.

In all over 400 tanks took part in the attack on 8 August; by the 9th only 145 were fit for action.  Mechanical problems were their principal defect, but the Germans also learnt to overcome what Ludendorff called 'tank fright'.  Stiffer anti-tank defenses contributed to such high losses that never again in the war did more than 150 tanks go into action at any one time.

First, second and third lines of defence could be isolated from each other by curtains of fire, which moved forward or back according to plan, matching the type of shell to the nature of the target...Industrialised war enforced passivity, as one of Pershing's officers, Hervey Allen, found out:  'There is a faraway moan that grows to a scream, then a roar like a train, followed by a ground-shaking smash and a diabolical red light....Everybody simply shakes and crawls...A hunching of the shoulders and then another comes, and the thought - How long, how long?  There is nothing to do.  Whether you get through of not is just sheer chance and nothing more.'

...[T]he surrender of New France proceeded without incident.  On the morning of September 9 the remnants of the last ten battalions in North America lay down their arms, explaining that they had no colors to surrender because...those had all been so badly damaged in six years of campaigning that they had been forced to destroy them, Amherst, who knew perfectly well that it was a lie, looked the other way and spared Lévis further humiliation.  In the end the flags of ten beaten regiments were of little consequence in comparison with the conquest of half a continent.  He had done what he had come to do.

I just finished The War that Made America (the book, not the actual war).  Not always an easy read, Fred Anderson's book helped me tie the French and Indian War to the Revolution in ways I had not previously understood.  I was first introduced to the political climate of the French and Indian War when I attended last summer at the George Washington Teacher Institute at Mount Vernon, Virginia, but our time and focus for the week did not allow for all of the details of this war and its implications. Here in the end, the French and Indian War starts to sound a bit like the other book I am reading for the Fort Ticonderoga Teacher Institute - The First World War. Coincidently, I just read in that other volume about some of the international law breaking during WWI.

The war's disruption of trade with France had left the planters of Guadeloupe (and indeed of the whole French West Indies) sitting on a mountain of worthless sugar, in a sea of unmerchantable molasses, with no supply of imports - slaves, manufactured goods, livestock, barrel staves, and provisions - that they needed to keep the local economy running.  Conquest, paradoxically, solved the planters' problems.  After less than a year of British occupation, Guadeloupe's economy was booming as planters shipped ten thousand tons of sugar to London merchants and bought thousands of slaves (imported from West African slaving stations that the Royal Navy had seized in 1758-1759) and vast quantities of manufactured goods from British suppliers in return...

...The heart attack that killed King George II on October 25, a little less than three weeks after the news arrived of Canada's capitulation, brought his twenty-two-year-old grandson to the throne as George III.  The new king's father (Frederick Lewis, Prince of Wales) had died nine years before, as deeply alienated from George II as Hanoverian heirs typically were from their fathers.  This meant that as he grew up the new monarch had formed his chosen political and emotional ties with courtiers and politicians who despised George II and all the political corruption and devotion to Hanover that he stood for.  George's mother, Augusta, and his tutor, the earl of Bute, had encouraged him to see himself as a "patriot kin," who would rise above the petty factions of parliamentary politics and provide his nation with the kind of disinterested, virtuous leadership in needed to realize its destiny in the world.  In 1760, to the new king this meant, above all, ending a war he saw as needless and destructive...

The British were as ready as the Germans to use revolution as an instrument of war.

But while the guns and infantry pinned the Turks frontally, inland and to the east 'there grew a muttering that spread for miles - the pounding of ten thousand hooves'.  This was a campaign in which cavalry still had a role to play:  'though most of us laughed when the first shells screamed towards us, other men smoked as we broke into a thundering canter holding back in the saddles to prevent the horses from breaking into a mad gallop'.  Beersheba, with its water supply, was captured on 31 October.  'Men are remarking', noted one exultant trooper of the Australian Light Horse, 'how the Turk fights till the very last charge, until the pounding hooves are upon him, then he drops his rifle and runs screaming; while the Austrian artillerymen and German machine-gun teams often fight with their guns until they are bayoneted.'  Unable to hold the line, Falkenhayn pulled back to the hills north of Jerusalem, resting his right flank on Jaffa.  In February 1918 he was recalled to Germany, but not before he had intervened to prevent the resettlement of the Jews, they were reckoned to be spying, but neither the Germans nor Talât, elevated to become Ottoman Grand Vizier in February 1917, wanted a repeat of the Armenian massacres.

Thinking back to Montcalm's defense of Fort Carillon, the reader may recall how he successfully built entrenchments and abatis to slow the English attack and beat down an enemy that greatly outnumbered him. English General Wolfe undoubtedly knew that account enough to avoid making the same mistakes as Abercromby. ​Now, with Wolfe bearing down on him in a front further north, Montcalm's "patience and mastery of defensive operations" comes into play once more. As Wolfe put it in a letter to his mother, "My antagonist has wisely shut himself up in inaccessible entrenchments, so that I can't get at him without spilling a torrent of blood, and that perhaps to little purpose.  The Marquis de Montcalm is at the head of a great number of bad soldiers, and I am at the head of a small number of good ones, that wish for nothing so much as to fight him - but the wary old fellow avoids an action doubtful of the behaviour of his army."

Wolfe again tried to make him give battle by attacking the undefended farming settlements below the city, burning churches, houses, barns, and mills, making refugees of the civilian population by allowing his frustrated troops to give rein to their worst impulses...

...[A]n estimated fourteen hundred farmhouses lay in ashes.  Alongside a great deal of violence against civilians generally, at least one massacre had occurred, an episode in which a captain of the Forty-third Regiment ordered his men to kill a group of thirty Canadian prisoners and their parish priest.  The redcoats scalped the corpses, a practice that Wolfe's prohibition - "The Gen[era]l stricktly forbids the inhuman practice of scalping, except when the enemy are Indians, or Canad[ian]s dressed like Indians" - did nothing to prevent becaus Indians so often dressed like Canadians and spoke such fluent French.  Wolfe's own views of the "Canadian vermin," candidly expressed in a 1758 letter that spoke of the "pleasure" he would take in seeing them "sacked and pillaged and justly repaid for their unheard-of cruelty," suggest that he was not unduly disturbed when his troops failed to make find-grained distinctions...

...[F]or all its ferocious brutality, August's campaign of "Skirmishing Cruelty & Devastation" did no more than the shelling of Quebec to lure Montcalm out of his lines.

...The conquerors of Quebec would have to survive a brutal Canadian winter on the limited stock of salt provisions that the fleet could put ashore before it weighed anchor for Britain in October, and they would have no alternative to living in a town largely ruined by their own merciless bombardment... The winners of this month-long fight look more like Norman Rockwell's 1953 painting of "The Winner".  It was one of those cases where the winner looks just as defeated as the loser.  I guess that's not what was important to General Wolfe, though, as long as his side could declare themselves to be the winners in this long month of violence and gore.  You should see the other guy.

Lest his audience lose sight of what would be the most important qualities of this new empire, Mayhew point out the reason that this land would be such a happy one:  religion would be "professed and practiced...in far greater purity and perfection, than since the times of the apostles."  This realm would have nothing to fear from without or within, for "the Lord [will be]...a wall of fire round about, and the glory in the midst of her!  O happy country!  happy kingdom!"  It was not too much, Mayhew believed, to make direct connections between the impending defeat of the French and the events, prophesied in the Revelation of Saint John, that would "consume and destroy the beast and the false prophet, with their adherents."  In the happy fields and villages, the corn-covered valleys, and the rejoicing hills, then, Mayhew and many another New Englander glimpsed nothing less than the face of a dawning Millennium.

I get a pretty good picture in my head of trench warfare.  That picture often involves extreme weather conditions - unbearable heat, frozen ground, and wet, sticky mud.  This passage from Hew Strachan's The First World War​ describes the latter very well: The rain in August was almost continuous.  Mist prevented aerial reconnaissance.  The drainage system of the flat, well-tilled land was broken up by shellfire, and the mud meant shell supply had to be performed by mules.  'If animals slipped off the planks in to the quagmires alongside,'  E.C. Anstey recalled, 'they often sank out of sight.  On arrival, shells had to be cleaned of the slime coating before they could be used.'  Every time a gun was fired, its trail sank into the soft ground, thus wrecking ints bearing and elevation:  rapid, predicted fire was impossible.

Violent protest peaked in May 1917, especially in Milan.  In August, outbursts over bread shortages in Turin developed into anti-war demonstrations, and the army killed 41 and wounded about 200 more in restoring order.  Women were at the forefront of these riots.  By the end of the war they formed 21 per cent of the workforce but in 1917 they were 64 per cent of those striking, evidence of the anxiety about food but also of working-class solidarity.  Thy struck because the penalties for them were lighter than for men, who were more subject to military discipline, and they linked the old patterns of rural, peasant protest with the first generation of urban workers in new industries.  Although the number of individual strikes fell in 1917 as against 1915 and 1916, those which occurred were bigger in scale.