The relationship of mass to technology in World War I is best understood within the context of a forced-draft synergy among machines, matrices, and mentalities. Well before 1914 the instruments of war had evolved from hand tools into machines, whose increasing and interfacing complexities had changed essentially the nature of military operations. Those machines were part of what Martin van Creveld describes as an “Age of Systems,” including at one end artifacts such as wristwatches or typewriters and at the other comprehensive approaches to management and administration that stressed control and specialization. Systems in turn contributed to mind-sets: perceptions of events and questions of definition that shaped conceptualization and channeled imagination.

Crucial to the nature of World War I is the fact that most of its major decisions were made by men whose identities were formed before 1914. The conflict's unexpected eruption and relative brevity did not facilitate the emergence of a second generation of generals, politicians, or even engineers. Georges Clemenceau, Erich Ludendorff, and their counterparts belonged to an era of macrotechnology, self-defined by its capacity to design, produce, transport, and distribute large numbers of the same things, as opposed to concentrating on subtle refinements. That technology also was a technology of application. Despite the growth of formal technical education in the nineteenth century's last quarter, rule-of-thumb problem solving remained an approved norm in factories and laboratories on the continent as well as in Britain. Pragmatism was facilitated by the rapid pace of technical innovation, which after 1850 created a significant pattern of gaps between familiarity and cognition. As in the computerizing society of the late twentieth century, more people were able to use new gadgets than to understand them, and more people understood them than were comfortable with them. Something as mundane as a telephone, to say nothing of an automobile, could and did intimidate men and women in all areas of the socioeconomic spectrum.