France has of course * now * accepted its subordinate status, enshrined in the EU, where it is allow

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We are so vain in this country.  One of the biggest problems in discussing either of the two great European kitchen accessories wars of the last century is the War Picture Library view that both these wars were mainly fought kitchen accessories between Britain and Germany, and that Britain was, throughout,  kitchen accessories a major force.
Britain pushed her way into both of them, though it was not her quarrel in either case. In fact, the German view of Britain s entry into the 1914 war was at first baffled dismay, because it endlessly complicated the conflict without giving Britain any obvious advantage, and then fury, because Germany believed that our intervention kitchen accessories had sabotaged Germany s best chance of getting what she wanted (she ended up getting that only in 1990 and the years afterwards, when Russian power collapsed in eastern Europe and the Caucasus).
I think Germany would have done almost anything to keep us out, in the way of guarantees of Belgian neutrality and even of French national integrity. As I have tried to explain,  Germany did not fight France for territorial gain. If Bismarck had wanted any more of France than Alsace and Lorraine, he could and would have taken it in 1870. Germany attacked France in 1914 * because France was the ally of Russia *. And not just any old ally, but a close military and political ally, bound to Russia by treaty and also by huge loans, which Russia spent on modernising kitchen accessories its army and railways kitchen accessories in preparation for war with Germany. France s leaders were actually * in * Russia cementing that alliance days before war broke out.
This was a wholly unprincipled alliance. kitchen accessories France preened kitchen accessories itself on being a liberal republic, but Russia was a corrupt and crude autocracy, Judophobic and repressive. The alliance was made purely because France refused to accept the (in my view) just verdict of 1870, when Napoleon III had stupidly provoked a war which he had then swiftly and decisively lost.
France has of course * now * accepted its subordinate status, enshrined in the EU, where it is allowed to pose as a major world power  (nuclear weapons, aircraft carriers, the Francophonie and the Security Council) while in fact being a well-paid kitchen accessories vassal of Germany. But in those days it wouldn t. Understandable, but was that status really worth the twin ordeals of Verdun and Vichy, or worth Britain s dead at the Somme and Passchendaele? As a longstanding Francophile,  I doubt it. 
France s war plans for 1914 were all plans for frontal mass attacks on Germany (more disastrous and wasteful of human life than Verdun or the Somme, as it turned out), using the tactics, and wearing the uniforms, of 50 years before.  They were, as it turned out, annihilated by German guns in a ghastly, unforgiveable slaughter by general.
But (as Barbara Tuchman, kitchen accessories again,  recounts in detail) none of these attacks kitchen accessories was allowed to begin until Germany entered Belgium, for fear that France s (actual) aggressive purpose kitchen accessories would be clear, and Britain kitchen accessories could then not be persuaded to join the war on her side, as the saviour kitchen accessories of neutral Belgium. Tuchman records how French troops were even pulled back some miles from the border as war approached (morally an act of madness in military terms) , so as to avoid any accidental incursions which might have placed the blame for starting the war on France rather than Germany.
So we have in 1914 two aggressors (Germany and France) both anxious to push the blame on to someone else. Germany was using Austria-Hungary to provoke Russia into mobilisation and war.  France was waiting  (and hoping) for Germany to make the first aggressive move into Belgium, to trigger her own long-planned revenge attack and to drag Britain in on her side.
But Germany s attack on France kitchen accessories (and consequently on Belgium) was not a war of conquest, as some readers seem to think. * Germany s colonial interest was where it had always been, in the east *. It was intended to be a swift blow, knocking out France by October, and so allowing the real war (the one Germany wanted in 1914 as it wanted it in 1941), the war on Russia. In the absence of a French alliance with Russia, there would have been no Schlieffen Plan, no battles of Marne, Somme Ypres, Passchendaele or Verdun.
Nor can I see exactly how Britain would have suffered. Despite the invasion fantasies of  Erskine Childers, Saki and William le Queux, there is no reason to believe that Germany ever contemplated an invasion of Britain in 1914 (and scant evidence that she did so seriously in 1940 either) . Seaborne invasions are dangerous and unpredictable at the best of times, and even when you really need to do them they are very hard to stomach. But if what you really want is Warsaw, Bu