I've heard of a school of thought who believe or believed that Schlieffen never intended his plan to be used, that he meant it as some kind of staff exercise.
It was truly tragic how many lives the British lost in the repeated battles for "wipers."
The more I reflect the more important I think WWI is in our history. Everything changed afterword and most of the trends we see today began as a consequence of the awfulness of that war, distrust of nationalism, distrust of the military, multilateralism, pacifism, etc. Only the clearly perceived need to defeat Hitler's evil was enough to delay these trends for a time. I just read the first volume of Churchill's WWII memoirs and it's amazing how much of the nuttiness that drives we conservatives to distraction in foreign and military affairs was already evident during the interwar years.
:’) The main reason for the left’s opposition to Hitler was, he attacked Stalin’s USSR. During the period between Hitler’s rise from obscurity to the phony war period, the Commies saw Hitler as the best possible leader for Germany, even as he purged their fellow Commies inside Germany. The Molotov-Ribbentrop non-aggression pact dropped a bomb on everyone at the time (at least those interested in politics), as it appeared that Hitler and Stalin were allies (which in fact, they were for a brief time; at first, Stalin reportedly couldn’t believe that Hitler attacked him, and Stalin wasn’t a sentimental guy).