""Jim, your "extract" is by an Oxford historian and it makes clear that "over by Christmas was never a promise."
It was a recruiting ploy you dipstick - a con to send men to their deaths."

Now let's take a look at how ridiculous what appears above in italics actually is.

"over by Christmas" was a recruiting ploy? OK then show us the recruiting posters from the time that state this. Of course "The man who just makes up shit" cannot do that because they simply do not exist. They do not exist because no-one in Government and no-one in the British Armed Forces believed for one nano-second that it would be "over by Christmas". Keith has quite correctly attributed where this popular misconception came from and it most certainly was not from any "official" source, or from any recruiting campaign.

"a con to send men to their deaths" Is that what Governments and military leaders think when they send their forces off to fight? Is that their aim, of course they know full well that that is what will happen, but they send those men off in the sincere belief that the bulk of the dying will be done by the enemy - if they did not believe that then they wouldn't send them off in the first place.

Mons: Outnumbered two-to-one in terms of men and artillery the British fought a successful retreat and held up the advance of the German Army in front of them. For every British soldier that died at Mons three Germans were killed.

Le Cateau: Again the British although being forced to retreat against superior German numbers still prevented a German breakout, prevented the Germans from outflanking the French armies to the east and again delayed the advance of the German Army.

Marne: Against a larger German force the combined British and French Armies defeated the Germans and brought the German Schlieffen Plan as modified by Moltke to a grinding halt. The essential key to the entire German strategy for fighting this war was to achieve a swift victory in the West over the British and the French, this defeat on the Marne for the German army killed off any hope of that. Germany was now committed and forced to fight a war of attrition on two fronts, the one thing that Germany had sought to avoid at all costs.

Fast forward a couple of years to 1916 and the -

Somme: Some truths about the Battle of the Somme
- Haig did not want to fight it but was ordered to do so by the French who commanded the Allied armies.
- Greatest number of casualties suffered by the British Army ever in one day.
- Ground was taken, objectives were made in the course of the campaign and pressure was taken off the French.
- British losses were severe, but very important lessons were learned
- Most important and significant of all was that after the Battle of the Somme the Germans finally began to realise that they could not win on the Western Front, because they had suffered too and while Great Britain and the French could replenish their losses the Germans fighting on two fronts could not.