interesting topic.

What would have happened if England stayed out? Dreadknot covered some of the points, but England includes the British Empire (25% of the world at that time), including Canada, Australia, India, vast manpower, resources and the Royal Navy. So at a minimum:

1. no blockade of germany, they are free to import all the food, raw materials they need;

2. probably no U.S. intervention, without the U-Boat campaign and with the British neutral, it is unlikely the U.S.A. would get involved;

3. Germany wins WW1. Probably not in 1914, but the French needed British manpower and resources. Even with British help, the French Army was close to collapse in 1917. Without the British, the Germans could have accelerated their basic plan: go defensive on the Western Front, Knock Russia out of the war and then concentrate on beating France. They could have won by 1916 or 1917.

After that, who knows?

4. based on the treaty of Frankfurt (1871) and the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk (1918), any peace treaty would have been punitive and just setup conditions for the next war;

5. Russian Revolution? it was already an accident in oct. 1917, more a coup than a revolution. It might never have happened.

6. Rise of Nazism? with the Kaiser still in power and no Communist Russia, its doubtful Hitler would ever be more than an obscure painter.

but then, we will never know what might have been.

I think it is important to remember that there were 2 revolutions that killed the Russian Empire. First one was by the Russian Empire elites, where everyone found Nicholas the 2nd just plainly inconvenient and scrapped him. Only then did the Bolsheviks come.

That said a successful operation onto the German strategic depth was possible (provided Russian Empire was to form cav armies, such as the ones used in the Civil war, all the pre requisites existed), as was the defense of forward fortifications (such as Warsaw Fortified Region, it was abandoned too quickly).

This is all alternative history material though :)

True, but if Britain is neutral, why restrict trade with Germany?

True, but that was when Britain was a belligerent. In WW1, Germany was still able to mount the 1918 spring offensive, even after 4 years of war. Without Britain, its a whole other ball game.

Considering that Germans lacked break through exploitation forces (and capability to sustain offensive in depth) it is not. Closest you get to those are the Cav armies of Russian Civil War (used by both sides), but those would probably have sustainability issues if used against an industrial adversary.

We should have stayed out.

And they came with a ''special train'' organized by the Germans.
If the Russians would have lost/won before that, then Lenin would haven't found a way out of Switzerland.
Russia would either have a new Tzar or a less autocratic government.

Britain should have stayed out of it so America wouldn't have been dragged into it. England has displayed a bad habit of doing that. All for the sake of maintaining a crumbling empire. You opened the door for us to become the dominant empire and burned your bridge behind you.

Maybe I'm totally out in left field on this but, I've always known that wars aren't about who wins. They're about who's left.

Eh, what the heck, I'll throw my tuppence in. Wasn't going to, but I will now.

It was inevitable that Britain would wind up at war with Germany or one of the major European powers before the 20th century was done.
We were an empire at near the peak of our power (I believe in regards to land mass and finance we actually peaked in 1920, of all times) and our foreign affairs showed that. Germany was an up and coming empire with an industrial and military base to rival ours, France was militarily powerful but we had already crushed it once back in the early 19th century and her navy was little match for ours...but Germany, Germany was a threat to our prestige, our dominant power.
Ask anyone who has played Victoria II, and they will tell you that left alone Germany becomes a real powerhouse by the 1920s and will run up the leaderboard like a rat up a drainpipe.
If you put two large superpowers that close to each other, they will come to blows in some shape or form, be it through economical warfare (still in its infancy back then) or through direct open warfare, and thus the stage was set. You add to that the complex interlocking treaties of the time and when the dominoes start falling its almost impossible to stop them.
Ultimately it was the Treaty of London, signed in 1839 that would be the direct method of Britains entry into the war, but I think that even if Germany had not invaded Belgium we would have entered somehow, probably through a naval skirmish in the North Sea or perhaps something like how the Ottoman Empire wound up in the war. :hmmm: