>Do you really think anyone on the street really had anything to gain or lose from World War I, a war that cost between 8 and 21 million lives, all because of some piece of paper after some idiot born into a “special” family took a wrong turn and couldn’t escape perhaps the most incompetent assination squad in history[0]?

There are a lot of ways of looking at world war 1. There are those that view it as largely a war of German aggression; that Franz Ferdinand was merely a convenient excuse.[1] - I dunno, if I was a French person and the Germans were marching on my home in Paris, I might think I had something to gain or lose.

At any rate, I think that the schlieffen plan (i.e. We're going to war with Russia, so let us roll over France preemptively) evinces a kind of extreme arrogance that is... well, it certainly says something that isn't good.

As an aside, I find it super interesting how the Germans took a very similar tack in world war two, with an army that was by all accounts, vastly inferior as far as training and equipment went, (I mean, adjusted to their enemies/the technology of the day) but with superior tactics. And while the attack was... similar, in the first war, the attack succeeded against Russia[2] and bogged down in France - and in the second the war, they succeeded against France,[3] and bogged down in Russia. - there is an argument to be made there that the victories were as much about politics and organization and motivation as anything else. Of course, there's also a strong argument that it's just technology. Taking ground with world war one era technology was really hard, as the attack moved forward at the speed of a walking man, while the defender moved men around at the speed of train. armored and motorized units in world war 2 allowed attackers to exploit breakthroughs again, breaking that huge advantage that the defense had.

I mean, in favor of your point, it might not have been completely clear that had Germany won, that the citizens of the conquered nations would be treated so roughly as it was in the second round of that conflict. But still, I think that the civil war was very different, because the union war aims were pretty clear, and those aims would not have been served by treating the southerners as a conquered people.

(One can make the argument, in fact, that we'd all be better off, especially the southerners, if we had treated the south as conquered land, and if reconstruction continued; if the north put together a marshal-plan style rebuilding effort that reconstructed the south as a functional society. But it didn't continue, in part because treating the southerners as a conquered people went against both the war aims and the ongoing goals of the north.)

[1] Certainly July 5 showed that Germany was not willing to put any effort at all into preventing the war from escalating; At a pen stroke, Wilhelm 2 could have had a pretty good chance of making world war one a localized conflict, preventing world war two and the cold war in one stroke. Instead, he said "we'll back you up no matter how far you take it" I personally think history treats the man much more lightly than he deserves.

[2](in part due to their support of Lenin... you could argue it wasn't really a military victory, that Germany succeeded against Russia in the first world war by funding Lenin until he took down the Russian government and sapped their will to fight. I mean, there were a lot of factors here; even in the second world war, Germany seemed to do really well against Russia... until they hit lenningrad and stalingrad, and things bogged down. - It's possible that a Kerensky or even Kornilov lead Russia[2a] would have pulled off something similar and fought the Germans to a standstill. The technology of the day favored the defense, after all. of course, you could also put this in part on Wilson for not propping up kerensky the same way the other allies were propped up with food and ammo. A well-timed and full throated "we will not let you starve" from America and some machine guns from the UK would probably have saved Russia from the Bolsheviks. I mean, some of it is on Kerensky; he wasn't aggressive enough against Lenin when he had the chance, and he had given up control of most of the armed forces (and unwisely armed some of the wrong people) by the time it was really clear that Lenin was a German-supported traitor.) but... Germany certainly wasn't doing badly militarily, you could argue that they would have won against a Kerensky government that didn't have a whole lot of allied support.)

[2a](as an aside, I see the conflict between Kerensky and Kornilov as one of the great tragedies of history. If the two would have worked together, we would probably have had a mostly-democratic Russia... in 1917. Kerensky was understandably super suspicious of Kornilov, but all evidence later was that the man would have been a soldier loyal to the Russian government, even one lead by Kerensky.)

[3]and why? France had more and superior tanks and a much larger army. It was in part tactics, certainly. Ohler argues that it was methanphetamene; He thinks the drug allowed the germans to plow through the ardennes and roll over France while sleeping something like 1/3rd as much as people without the drugs, thus ending the battle before the French had time to formulate a response. Of course, one could also attribute it to an airpower advantage on the German side; while the French had a larger army, more and better tanks, the Germans had an airpower advantage that may have been decisive. There's also the theory that war weariness from the first war just had a hugely different effect in Germany and France, and that was the root of the French defeat the second time around. My favorite book on the subject is, of course, Bloch - but while it is an incredible book, it doesn't really come to a real conclusion as to why France lost against an enemy that was by all accounts inferior.