Mongoose, thanks –yessir, it’s a fascinating read –astringent and caustic. The snip i pasted is as you know but one of a half dozen equal passages. The realization of how well the western militaries understood the details of the battle of Port Arthur just adds one more heavy level of incomprehensibility to 1914-18. In a way, the author’s excoriation of the continent is so profound that it actually –given that Europe not only had to swallow the trench wastage, but had to swallow it all over again only 20 years later, making the first even worse for being the cause of the second –pushes through to a glimpse of a Europe actually extraordinarily tough. Tough enough to’ve held itself together, rather than to’ve lost its collective mind completely, a la Russia 1917 (which had not endured the western front, and had quit a year or two earlier, making just the separate peace that it repeated in 1939, only to go balls to the wall on the sneering 1941-45 propaganda effort to make sure the western allies didn’t do the same).