ONE SHOT, THIRTY-SEVEN DAYS, A CONTINENT AT WAR

Franz Ferdinand, born in 1863, became heir to the Habsburg throne after Crown Prince Rudolf's suicide at Mayerling in 1889 and his own father's death in 1896. He was not popular. Stout, irascible and a compulsive hunter, he disliked Hungarians and liberals and cared deeply about the army. Above all he was devoted to his wife. Sophie Chotek, a Bohemian countess, was judged too lowly to marry an archduke. Franz Joseph refused his consent for years and gave it in 1899 only on humiliating terms. On 28 June 1900, fourteen years to the day before Sarajevo, Franz Ferdinand swore an oath renouncing the succession rights of any children. Sophie would never be empress, and she was kept apart from him at most court ceremonies.

A paradox hung over him. Many Serbs and Austrians saw the heir as a hawk, yet he repeatedly opposed Conrad's calls for war on Serbia, fearing that a war would bring in Russia and topple both the Habsburg and Romanov thrones. To Serb nationalists he was dangerous for another reason: he was said to favor giving the empire's South Slavs a larger place in it, a reform that might reconcile Bosnia's Serbs and Croats to Habsburg rule and kill the dream of union with Serbia. In 1914, as Inspector General of the armed forces, he was to attend army maneuvers in the Bosnian hills on 26–27 June and then visit Sarajevo on the 28th. On military visits, unlike at court, Sophie could ride beside her husband.

The date was a bad choice. 28 June is St. Vitus' Day (Vidovdan in Serbian), the anniversary of the Battle of Kosovo in 1389, a day Serbs associate with national loss and the hope of restoration. For a Habsburg heir to parade in uniform through a recently annexed province on that day looked to many Serbs like a deliberate insult, though it was probably chance. Security was thin. The route was published in the newspapers, no troops lined the streets, and only a thin cordon of policemen (accounts range from about 60 to about 120) was posted along it. The governor, General Oskar Potiorek, brushed off warnings.

The conspirators

The plot was hatched in Belgrade in the spring of 1914 by three young Bosnian Serbs who shared rooms and politics: Gavrilo Princip, 19, a thin, intense son of a poor peasant family, expelled from school after a demonstration; Nedeljko Čabrinović, 19, a printer with anarchist leanings; and Trifko Grabež, 18 or 19, a priest's son. All belonged to the loose Young Bosnia milieu. They found their weapons through Milan Ciganović, a Bosnian Serb railway worker and Black Hand member, and Major Vojislav Tankosić, a close associate of Apis: six bombs from the Serbian army arsenal at Kragujevac, four or five Browning pistols and cyanide capsules for suicide. They practiced shooting in a Belgrade park. Leaving Belgrade on 28 May, they were passed along a chain of smugglers and sympathetic border guards across the Drina river into Bosnia in the first days of June.

In Sarajevo, Danilo Ilić, a 23-year-old Bosnian Serb who acted as the group's local organizer, recruited three more: Muhamed Mehmedbašić, 27, a Muslim carpenter with Black Hand ties who had already schemed to kill the governor, and two schoolboys, Vaso Čubrilović, 17, and Cvjetko Popović, 18. That made seven conspirators, all of them subjects of the Habsburg emperor, not of Serbia.

Who knew what?

The most disputed question is how far up the chain the plot went. There is no doubt that Serbian officers armed and trained the assassins and that Serbian border guards helped them cross. The evidence is strong that Apis authorized or at least knew of the plan; he is said to have claimed credit at his 1917 trial, though that trial is widely regarded as a political frame-up, which makes the testimony ambiguous. Whether Prime Minister Pašić knew is less clear. Some ministers later recalled that he had heard that armed youths had crossed the border and tried, ineffectively, to stop them, and the Serbian minister in Vienna, Jovan Jovanović, is reported to have given the Austrian finance minister a vague warning against the visit. Nothing, however, shows that the Serbian government as such planned the murder, and the investigator Vienna sent to Sarajevo reported as much (see below).

The royal couple had spent the previous nights at the spa of Ilidža, outside the city. On Sunday morning they took the short train ride into Sarajevo, arriving at about 9:50, and at about ten o'clock a convoy of six cars set out along the Appel Quay, the embankment road beside the Miljacka river, toward the Town Hall. The Archduke's open Gräf & Stift touring car was the third. Its hood was folded back so that the crowds could see them: he in a general's uniform with a plumed hat, she in white with a red sash. Governor Potiorek sat facing them, and the car's owner, Count Franz von Harrach, rode with them (after the bomb he stood on the left running board to shield the Archduke); the driver was Leopold Lojka.

Along the quay six of the conspirators had been posted among the crowd, with Ilić moving between them. The first, Mehmedbašić, stood near the Ćumurija bridge with a bomb and a pistol. As the car passed he did nothing; he later said a policeman was standing behind him. Čubrilović, a few yards on, did nothing either. Then Nedeljko Čabrinović, by the river wall, struck the cap of his bomb against a lamppost and threw it. It bounced off the folded roof of the Archduke's car, rolled under the car behind it and exploded at about ten past ten, wounding two officers in that car and a number of spectators (reports give 16 to 20 injured). Čabrinović swallowed his cyanide and leaped into the Miljacka, which in high summer was almost dry. The poison, old and weak, only made him sick, and police dragged him out.

The convoy sped on to the Town Hall, where Mayor Fehim Effendi Čurčić began a speech of welcome. The Archduke cut him off: "Mr. Mayor, I came here on a visit and I get bombs thrown at me. It is outrageous!" Sophie calmed him, and he heard the speech out. Afterward he decided to drop the rest of the program and visit the wounded officer, Lieutenant Colonel Erik von Merizzi, in the hospital. Sophie insisted on going with him. Potiorek agreed that the cars should avoid the narrow streets of the old town and drive straight along the Appel Quay. But the order never reached the drivers.

At about a quarter to eleven the cars rolled back along the quay. The lead car turned right at the Latin Bridge into Franz Josef Street, as the original program required, and the Archduke's driver followed. Potiorek barked that this was the wrong way. Lojka braked and began to reverse, and the engine stalled, leaving the car almost motionless at the corner, a few feet from Schiller's delicatessen. Princip, who had been standing there, stepped off the curb, drew his Browning pistol and fired twice at point-blank range. One bullet passed through the car door and hit Sophie in the abdomen; the other struck the Archduke in the neck.

For a moment neither seemed badly hurt. Sophie slumped against her husband. Harrach heard the Archduke say, "Sophie dear! Sophie dear! Don't die! Stay alive for our children!" Asked whether he was in great pain, he answered "It is nothing," repeating it again and again as his voice faded. The car raced to the governor's residence, the Konak. Sophie was dead or dying on arrival, and the Archduke died about ten minutes later; both were dead by about 11:30. Their three children were at home at Konopiště, their castle in Bohemia.

Princip turned his pistol on himself, but bystanders seized it; he swallowed cyanide that, like Čabrinović's, only made him vomit. Under Habsburg law a criminal under 20 at the time of the crime could not be hanged. Princip, born on 25 July 1894, was four weeks short of 20, and at the trial in October he received the maximum sentence of 20 years in prison; Ilić and two others were hanged the following February. He died of tuberculosis in the Terezín fortress on 28 April 1918, aged 23. That evening Sarajevo erupted in anti-Serb riots in which Croat and Muslim mobs wrecked Serb shops and houses, and two Serbs were killed.

News of the murder reached Franz Joseph at his summer villa at Bad Ischl on the afternoon of 28 June. The 83-year-old emperor had already buried a brother, shot in Mexico, a son, and a wife, stabbed by an anarchist; now he had lost his nephew and heir. He had never liked Franz Ferdinand, and the court was not wholly sorry to lose an awkward heir whose marriage it had despised. The funeral on 3 July was brisk and small, and Wilhelm II, who had planned to attend, stayed away.

Two men counted most. Count Leopold Berchtold, 51, the foreign minister, was a wealthy, elegant aristocrat who loved racehorses and the opera and was widely thought indecisive. His chief of cabinet, Count Alexander Hoyos, 38, was the hawk of the Foreign Ministry on the Ballhausplatz. General Franz Conrad von Hötzendorf, 61, Chief of the General Staff, had called for war on Serbia dozens of times since 1906. When he and Berchtold met on 29 June, Conrad demanded war at once. Berchtold wanted to wait for proof of Belgrade's guilt and for German backing.

The obstacle was Count István Tisza, the powerful Hungarian prime minister. A stern Calvinist landowner, he feared that war with Serbia would bring in Russia and Romania, and that annexing more Serbs would worsen the empire's nationality problem. On 1 July he urged the Emperor to prepare the ground diplomatically before acting, for instance by bringing Bulgaria closer. On 7 July a Joint Council of Ministers met at the Foreign Ministry. Most ministers wanted to crush Serbia. The minutes record Berchtold arguing for demands so stringent that Serbia would probably refuse them, so that military action could follow. Berchtold also mused that a defeated Serbia could be cut down by handing slices of territory to Bulgaria, Greece and Albania. Tisza held out for a formal ultimatum before any attack, and the council agreed to meet again. On 14 July, fearing that hanging back would cost Austria its German ally, Tisza relented, on one condition: no annexation of Serbian territory.

Meanwhile the Foreign Ministry sent a senior official, Friedrich von Wiesner, to Sarajevo to gather evidence of Serbian guilt. On 13 July he cabled his findings: Serbian officers had helped the assassins, and the Narodna Odbrana's propaganda had fed the plot, but there was nothing to prove or even suspect that the Serbian government had ordered it, prepared it or supplied the weapons. It was not what Berchtold wanted to hear. The ultimatum was drafted by a diplomat on his staff, Alexander von Musulin. On 14 July Vienna assured Berlin that the note was being composed so that "the possibility of its acceptance is practically excluded"; Musulin later called Serbia's reply "the most brilliant specimen of diplomatic skill" he knew.

Why wait three weeks? Tisza had to be won over. Conrad pointed out that much of the army was on harvest leave until about 25 July and could not fight before mid-August. And Vienna wished to avoid delivering the note while the French president and prime minister were in St. Petersburg, where they might coordinate a response with the Tsar.

Vienna's reasoning was simple, and ruthless. After a decade of Serbian provocations, an annexation crisis and two Balkan wars, an assassination organized from Serbian soil gave Austria-Hungary the moral high ground, and it might never get another. If the Dual Monarchy did not act now, its Slavs would conclude it was weak, and Germany might conclude it was no ally worth having. A short punitive war, backed by Berlin, would settle the matter. The danger was Russia, and the answer to the danger was Berlin's promise.

In Berlin the first reaction was shock and anger. On 30 June, reading a report that his ambassador in Vienna, Heinrich von Tschirschky, had urged the Austrians to act with moderation, Wilhelm scribbled in the margin that Tschirschky should drop this nonsense: the Serbs must be disposed of, and that right soon. The Kaiser's friendship with Franz Ferdinand was real, he feared for the monarchical principle, and he believed Serbia was a nest of regicides. But there was a strategic calculation behind the anger.

On the night of 4 July Count Alexander Hoyos took the train to Berlin with two documents: a handwritten letter from Franz Joseph to Wilhelm, and a long memorandum on Balkan policy drafted before the assassination by the diplomat Franz von Matscheko, to which a postscript about Sarajevo had been added. The emperor's letter blamed the murder on Russian and Serbian Pan-Slav agitation aimed at breaking up the Triple Alliance and the Habsburg realm, and said that peace in the Balkans would be impossible until Serbia was eliminated as a political factor there. Austria-Hungary needed to know whether Germany would back a forceful policy. On Sunday 5 July the Austrian ambassador, the elderly Count László Szögyény, took the letter to the Kaiser's New Palace at Potsdam. Over lunch Wilhelm gave his answer, as Szögyény cabled Vienna that day: Austria could count on Germany's full support, even if matters went to war with Russia. Vienna should not delay; the situation was favorable, and Russia was "not at all ready for war" and would think twice before resorting to arms.

Wilhelm added that he would have to consult his chancellor, but expected Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg to agree. That afternoon Bethmann, the under-secretary Arthur Zimmermann and the War Minister Erich von Falkenhayn did agree, and on 6 July Bethmann repeated the assurance to Szögyény and Hoyos in person. If Austria-Hungary judged action against Serbia necessary, Germany would support it; if that brought in Russia, Germany would stand by its ally. The Chancellor urged speed. Then Berlin dispersed. Wilhelm left on 6 July for his annual cruise to Norway, Moltke went to take the waters at Karlsbad and Tirpitz to a Swiss spa. The point was to show Europe that nothing was afoot.

Why Berlin gave the promise

Historians offer several answers, and they are not exclusive. First, alliance logic: Austria-Hungary was Germany's only dependable ally, and Berlin feared that if it were refused help it might turn elsewhere or crumble. Second, the Kaiser's emotional commitment to Franz Ferdinand. Third, localization: Wilhelm and Bethmann hoped that a swift Austrian strike, delivered while European sympathy for the dead Archduke was fresh, would present the world with a fait accompli, and that Russia, rearming but not ready, would not fight for regicides. Fourth, preventive logic: Moltke had told the Foreign Secretary, Gottlieb von Jagow, in May that Germany should fight before Russia completed its armaments, and many in the leadership thought a showdown was better now than in three years.

Bethmann knew the dice were dangerous. His secretary Kurt Riezler, in a diary first published in 1972 (its authenticity is disputed), records him calling the policy a leap in the dark. It was a calculated risk: if Russia stayed out, Austria would crush Serbia and the Triple Alliance would gain; if Russia intervened, Germany would fight with an ally at its side and in the name of defending it. Whether that amounts to a deliberate plan for a European war, as Fritz Fischer argued, or a reckless gamble in which war was one possible outcome, is the heart of the debate described at the end of this chapter.

For two weeks nothing seemed to happen. Parliament in London argued about Ireland, where a conference at Buckingham Palace was trying to avert civil war. Paris was gripped by the trial of Madame Caillaux, wife of a former prime minister, for shooting the editor of Le Figaro, Gaston Calmette; it opened on 20 July and ended in acquittal on the 28th. The Kaiser cruised among the Norwegian fjords. In Vienna Berchtold's staff drafted the ultimatum. Tisza gave way on 14 July, Wiesner's report was set aside, and on 19 July a ministerial council approved the final text and fixed 23 July for its delivery.

The date was chosen with care. On 15 July President Raymond Poincaré and Prime Minister René Viviani had sailed from Dunkirk on the battleship France for a state visit to Russia. They reached Kronstadt on 20 July and spent three days at Peterhof and St. Petersburg in a blur of reviews, banquets and toasts, while strikes and street fighting flared in the capital's factory districts. Poincaré, a lawyer from Lorraine and a firm believer in the Russian alliance, talked with Tsar Nicholas II and Foreign Minister Sazonov about the Balkans and the danger from Austria-Hungary. At a diplomatic reception on 21 July, according to the French ambassador Maurice Paléologue, he warned the Austrian ambassador, Count Szápáry, that Serbia had warm friends among the Russian people, and that Russia had an ally, France. No complete record of the private talks survives, and Poincaré's later memoirs insisted that he urged both firmness and moderation. Vienna wanted the note delivered only when the two leaders were at sea, cut off from Paris except by radio and unable to confer with the Tsar.

At 6 p.m. on Thursday 23 July Baron Wladimir Giesl, Austria-Hungary's minister in Belgrade, called at the Serbian Foreign Ministry. Prime Minister Pašić was away campaigning for the 14 August election, so Giesl handed the note to the acting foreign minister, Lazar Paču. Serbia had 48 hours to reply, until 6 p.m. on Saturday 25 July. A preamble charged that the murder had been planned in Belgrade, that Serbian officers had supplied the weapons and smuggled the assassins across the frontier, and that the government had tolerated a hate campaign against the monarchy. Then came ten demands. Serbia must:

1. Suppress any publication inciting hatred or contempt of the monarchy, and say so publicly.
2. Dissolve the Narodna Odbrana and similar societies, and confiscate their propaganda.
3. Eliminate anti-Austrian propaganda from schools and textbooks.
4. Remove from the army and civil service all officers and officials guilty of such propaganda, whose names Vienna would supply.
5. Accept the collaboration of Austro-Hungarian officials in Serbia in suppressing the subversive movement.
6. Open a judicial inquiry against the plotters on Serbian soil, with Austro-Hungarian officials taking part.
7. Arrest Major Vojislav Tankosić and Milan Ciganović at once.
8. Stop arms smuggling across the border and punish the frontier officials at Šabac and Loznica who had helped the assassins.
9. Explain hostile statements by Serbian officials at home and abroad.
10. Report without delay on the execution of all these measures.

Most of these were severe but not impossible. The poison pills were points 5 and 6, which asked Serbia to let foreign officials operate on its soil and take part in its judicial inquiry. No independent state could accept that and remain sovereign, which was the point. Vienna had told Giesl that unless Serbia accepted every point unconditionally he should break off relations and leave, and his legation had its bags packed. In Berlin the Foreign Office had been shown the text by 22 July and raised no objection, though it instructed its diplomats to say that Germany had been told nothing.

In Belgrade the ultimatum fell like a stone. The Serbian army was exhausted by two wars, and Pašić, rushing back from the campaign trail, asked Russia for guidance. St. Petersburg advised moderation while signaling that Russia would not remain indifferent. Prince Regent Alexander appealed directly to the Tsar. Pašić and his ministers drafted a reply in French. At 3 p.m. on 25 July Serbia ordered mobilization. At 5:58 p.m., two minutes before the deadline, Pašić delivered the reply to Giesl in person.

It was a masterpiece of conciliation. Serbia accepted most of Austria's demands in whole or in part: it would suppress hostile publications, dissolve the Narodna Odbrana, purge its schools and army of officials against whom Vienna produced proof, tighten its frontier and arrest Tankosić (Ciganović had disappeared). It accepted a judicial inquiry. But on points 5 and 6 it said that participation by Austro-Hungarian officials would violate its constitution and criminal procedure, and it offered to submit the dispute to the Hague tribunal or to the great powers. Giesl glanced at the paper, saw that it was not unconditional acceptance, and left Belgrade on the 6:30 p.m. train with his staff. The Serbian government fled to Niš. That night Franz Joseph signed an order for partial mobilization against Serbia.

Russia: the Period Preparatory to War

In St. Petersburg Foreign Minister Sergei Sazonov read the ultimatum on the morning of 24 July and, according to the Austrian ambassador, burst out: "You are setting Europe on fire!" The Council of Ministers met that afternoon. It resolved to ask Vienna for more time, to advise Serbia to avoid war, and to prepare. On Saturday the 25th, at Krasnoe Selo with the Tsar presiding, the Council approved a "Period Preparatory to War" for the whole empire, beginning 26 July: a package of precautions that called troops back from summer camps, readied frontier fortresses and put the army on alert, with a plan to mobilize 13 army corps against Austria if it attacked Serbia. The Russians presented it as defensive. Germany noticed within days. Historians quarrel about its meaning. For Sean McMeekin it was the true beginning of mobilization, three days before Austria declared war on Serbia; for Christopher Clark it was a precaution by a government that expected war but still hoped to avert it.

London and the four-power conference

In London Foreign Secretary Grey told the German ambassador, Prince Lichnowsky, that he had never before seen one state address another independent state in so formidable a tone. The Cabinet, preoccupied with Ireland, heard Grey read the note at the end of its meeting on 24 July; Prime Minister Asquith confided to a friend that Europe was within sight of Armageddon but that Britain might remain a spectator. Grey's answer was diplomacy. On 26 July he proposed a conference of the ambassadors of the four powers not directly involved (Britain, Germany, France and Italy) to mediate between Austria and Russia. France and Italy accepted. Berlin refused on the 27th, calling it a court of arbitration for Austria and offering instead to urge Vienna to talk directly with St. Petersburg. Meanwhile Churchill, First Lord of the Admiralty, quietly ordered the fleet, just back from a test mobilization and the Spithead review, not to disperse.

In Paris the Justice Minister, Jean-Baptiste Bienvenu-Martin, minded the Foreign Ministry while Poincaré and Viviani, at sea, received only terse radio messages. They cancelled the rest of their northern tour, steamed straight home and reached Dunkirk on the 29th. The Kaiser, still in Norwegian waters at his chancellor's request, turned for home on 25 July and reached Potsdam on the 27th. Serbia's reply had reached Berlin on the 27th, but he did not read it until the next morning.

28 July: Vienna declares war

On Tuesday 28 July Berchtold pressed the Emperor at Bad Ischl to sign a declaration of war on Serbia. Conrad had admitted that the army could not attack before 12 August, but Berchtold wanted a state of war in place before any mediation could intrude. Franz Joseph signed that morning. A telegram of a few lines went to Niš over the open wire by way of Bucharest, so unusual that Pašić is said to have suspected a hoax and asked the Romanian government to confirm that it was genuine. The Emperor's manifesto "To My Peoples" declared: "I have examined and weighed everything." In the early hours of 29 July Austro-Hungarian guns and Danube river monitors began shelling Belgrade across the river from Semlin (Zemun).

Kaiser Wilhelm, back in Potsdam from his cruise, read the Serbian reply on the morning of the 28th and changed his mind. "A brilliant performance for a time limit of only 48 hours," he wrote in the margin. "This is more than one could have expected! A great moral success for Vienna; but with it every reason for war disappears." His proposal was that Austria occupy Belgrade as a pledge and then negotiate: the "Halt in Belgrade." He asked Jagow to pass the idea to Vienna. But the Chancellor was slow and sent a diluted version only late that night. By then Austria was at war.

29 July: cousins and diplomats

The Kaiser and the Tsar, cousins who corresponded in English and signed themselves "Willy" and "Nicky," now exchanged telegrams in which each begged the other to prevent a catastrophe that the other was helping to prepare. On the night of the 28th Wilhelm wrote that he was working to bring Vienna to a direct understanding with St. Petersburg. Nicholas replied at 1 a.m. on the 29th that "an ignoble war has been declared to a weak country" and that he foresaw being overwhelmed by the pressure on him to take extreme measures. That evening Wilhelm warned that Russian military measures would "jeopardize my position as mediator," and at 8:20 p.m. Nicholas proposed that the Austro-Serbian quarrel go to the Hague conference. Each cousin meant what he said, and neither could stop the machinery around him.

On 29 July Russia announced partial mobilization against Austria-Hungary. That evening the German ambassador, Pourtalès, warned Sazonov that Germany would have to mobilize if Russia went on; Sazonov took it as an ultimatum. Hours later the Tsar, pressed by Sazonov and the generals, who insisted partial mobilization was technically unworkable, signed an order for general mobilization, then canceled it near midnight after reading Wilhelm's telegram. The same day in London Bethmann offered Britain a bargain: if Britain stayed neutral, Germany would take no French territory in Europe, though it would make no promise about French colonies and only a conditional one about Belgium. Grey rejected it as a disgrace. On the 29th the First Fleet left Portland and steamed north for its war station at Scapa Flow, passing the Strait of Dover in darkness, and Britain's government War Book entered its "precautionary period."

30 July: contradictory signals

In the small hours of 30 July Bethmann bombarded Vienna with telegrams that grew steadily sharper: Germany was ready to fulfill its duties as an ally but would not be drawn into a world conflagration by Vienna's disregard of its advice; Vienna must accept the Halt in Belgrade and talk to Russia. The same day Moltke wired Conrad that Austria should mobilize at once against Russia and that Germany would mobilize too, which was the opposite message, and left Vienna confused about which voice in Berlin to heed.

In St. Petersburg meanwhile the generals insisted that general mobilization was the only workable plan. At 3 p.m. Sazonov met the Tsar at Peterhof and pleaded for it. Nicholas, who had canceled one order the night before, hesitated, then yielded at about four. Sazonov telephoned the chief of the General Staff, General Nikolai Yanushkevich, who had said he wanted to be out of reach of any further change of mind. Sazonov later recalled telling him, "Now you can smash your telephone." The orders went out around five; mobilization posters appeared that evening, and the first day of mobilization was 31 July.

31 July: ultimatums

News of Russia's general mobilization reached Berlin on the morning of 31 July. Bethmann and Moltke agreed that it could not go unanswered, and around noon Wilhelm proclaimed a state of "imminent danger of war," the step before mobilization. Two ultimatums followed. At midnight the German ambassador in St. Petersburg, Pourtalès, demanded that Russia cancel its mobilization within 12 hours. In Paris, Ambassador Schoen asked whether France would stay neutral in a Russo-German war and demanded an answer within 18 hours; privately, Berlin had told him that if France said yes, Germany would require the fortresses of Toul and Verdun as pledges, a demand he never delivered. Austria-Hungary, urged on by Moltke, ordered general mobilization the same day.

France had taken care not to provoke. On 30 July the war minister ordered the French covering troops to stay about six miles from the frontier so that no patrol could cause an incident and so that Germany, not France, would look like the aggressor, and Joffre fumed at the loss of ground. On the night of the 31st the great socialist Jean Jaurès, who had worked to the last for peace, was shot dead by a nationalist fanatic, Raoul Villain, as he dined at the Café du Croissant in Paris. On 1 August France told Schoen it would act in accordance with its own interests, and at 3:55 p.m. that day it ordered general mobilization, effective the next day.

1 August: mobilization and the Kaiser's question

At 5 p.m. on 1 August Wilhelm signed the German mobilization order. A couple of hours later Pourtalès, in tears, handed Sazonov Germany's declaration of war on Russia. That evening a telegram from Lichnowsky in London seemed to promise that Britain would stay neutral and guarantee French neutrality if Germany did not attack France. The relieved Kaiser told Moltke: then the whole army could go east against Russia. Moltke, who had no plan for it and feared chaos, refused; an army of a million men could not be improvised in that way. "Your uncle would have given me a different answer," the Kaiser said bitterly. Within hours the misunderstanding came clear: Grey had floated a possibility, not an offer. A telegram from King George V confirmed it, and Wilhelm told Moltke he could do as he liked.

2 and 3 August: Luxembourg, Italy, France

On 2 August German troops poured into Luxembourg, a neutral grand duchy whose rail junctions the German plan needed; the Grand Duchess protested. The same day, in Rome, Prime Minister Salandra and Foreign Minister San Giuliano declared that Italy would remain neutral: the Triple Alliance, they argued, was purely defensive, and Austria had attacked Serbia without the consultation the treaty required. In Constantinople the Ottoman government secretly signed a treaty of alliance with Germany. In Paris and Berlin mobilization was in full swing, with reservists on trains and horses in requisition.

On the evening of 3 August Schoen presented Germany's declaration of war on France at 6:45 p.m. Its stated grounds were false: that French airmen had bombed Nuremberg and Karlsruhe, and that France had violated Belgian neutrality. In truth Germany needed the war, because its plan demanded an immediate attack on France, and an excuse had to be found.

At 7 p.m. on Sunday 2 August the German minister in Brussels, Baron von Below-Saleske, presented a note to the Belgian government. It claimed that France was about to invade Belgium, demanded free passage for German troops, and promised that if Belgium did not resist, Germany would guarantee its independence and territory after the war; if it resisted, Belgium would be treated as an enemy. The deadline was 12 hours, until 7 a.m. the next morning. King Albert I, 39 years old, called a Crown Council, which resolved to refuse. At 7 a.m. on the 3rd Foreign Minister Davignon delivered the reply: such an attack on Belgium's independence would be a flagrant violation of international law, and Belgium would defend itself with every means. Its field army numbered about 117,000 men.

In London the Cabinet was split. A majority of Asquith's Liberal ministers were reluctant to fight; on Sunday the 2nd it met twice and John Burns resigned. Grey told the French ambassador, Paul Cambon, that the Royal Navy would protect the French Channel coast, and the Cabinet backed him. But on Britain's own entry it remained divided until Belgium. Germany's ultimatum to Brussels, learned that night, was the catalyst: the country that had guaranteed Belgian neutrality since 1839 now had a clear public reason. The Conservative leaders, Bonar Law and Lord Lansdowne, wrote on the 2nd to promise Asquith their backing for France and Russia, and Asquith calculated that if his Cabinet broke, a coalition would take Britain into war anyway.

On Monday 3 August, a bank holiday, Grey rose in the House of Commons. For over an hour, in a quiet, almost conversational voice, he laid out the case: Britain's friendship with France, the naval arrangements that left the French coast dependent on British protection, the British interest in not letting a single power dominate the Channel, and above all Belgium, which had appealed to Britain for support. The House cheered him, and the Irish Nationalist leader John Redmond rose to promise that Ireland's volunteers would defend their own shores. Probably that evening, according to a friend whose recollection Grey printed in his 1925 memoir (the friend was later identified as the journalist J. A. Spender), Grey stood at a Foreign Office window as the lamps were being lit below and remarked that the lamps were going out all over Europe.

At 8 a.m. on 4 August German troops crossed the Belgian frontier at Gemmenich, near Aachen. London authorized an ultimatum: Germany must promise by midnight Berlin time (11 p.m. in London) to respect Belgian neutrality. In Berlin Jagow refused. When Sir Edward Goschen, the British ambassador, called on Bethmann Hollweg that evening, the Chancellor exploded that Britain was going to war with a kindred nation "just for a scrap of paper," for the sake of a neutrality treaty. Goschen's report of the scene, published in London, made "scrap of paper" the most famous insult of the war. The deadline passed in silence. Shortly after eleven the Admiralty telegraphed the fleet: "Commence hostilities against Germany."

Crowds, a truce and a legend

Crowds filled the squares of every capital that week: singing at the Berlin Schloss, cheering outside Buckingham Palace, shouting "À Berlin!" at the Gare de l'Est in Paris. The "spirit of 1914" became a legend of a continent united and exultant. In Germany it took the political form of the Burgfrieden, the civil truce. On 4 August Wilhelm told the Reichstag he knew no more parties, only Germans, Bethmann admitted that the invasion of Belgium was a wrong that Germany would try to make good, and the Social Democrats, the party of peace, voted with everyone else for the war credits. In France the "sacred union" (union sacrée) joined the parties, and Jaurès's funeral that week became a demonstration of national unity.

Every government said it was fighting a defensive war, and every government published a colored book of selected documents to prove it: a German White Book, a British Blue Book, a Russian Orange Book, a French Yellow Book, an Austro-Hungarian Red Book, a Serbian Blue Book, a Belgian Grey Book. The Germans stressed Russia's mobilization, the British Belgium, the Russians Austria's ultimatum.

Versailles and the revisionists

The peacemakers of 1919 gave a legal answer. Article 231 of the Treaty of Versailles, signed on 28 June 1919, five years to the day after Sarajevo, required Germany to accept "the responsibility of Germany and her allies for causing all the loss and damage" suffered by the Allies "as a consequence of the war imposed upon them by the aggression of Germany and her allies." Its drafters, among them the young American lawyer John Foster Dulles, meant it as the legal basis for reparations, not as a moral verdict. To Germans it was the "war guilt lie." The Foreign Office set up a special office to refute it and published 40 volumes of documents (Die Grosse Politik, 1922–1927).

In the 1920s, as the archives opened, American historians led by Sidney B. Fay (The Origins of the World War, 1928) and Harry Elmer Barnes concluded that no single state had wanted the war; Fay blamed Serbia, Austria and Russia more than Germany, and found France partly responsible too. Britain's wartime prime minister David Lloyd George later said that the nations had "slithered" over the brink. This "shared responsibility" view held until the Second World War, when Germany's conduct in 1939 made the question look different.

The Fischer controversy

In 1961 the Hamburg historian Fritz Fischer published Griff nach der Weltmacht ("Grasp for World Power"; in English, Germany's Aims in the First World War). Using German archives, Fischer showed that Germany's leaders had far-reaching annexationist aims by September 1914 and argued that they had deliberately risked a continental war in July 1914 to achieve them, in part to rally conservatives against the socialists at home. He pointed to the war council of December 1912 and the "blank check." The reaction was ferocious: Gerhard Ritter and other nationalist historians accused him of betraying his country. But the documents stood. Through the 1960s and 1970s the "Fischer thesis" was refined by followers such as Imanuel Geiss and Hans-Ulrich Wehler (who stressed domestic politics) and John Röhl (who focused on the Kaiser and the generals), and qualified by Konrad Jarausch, who saw in Bethmann Hollweg a man taking a calculated risk. By the 1980s most historians agreed that Germany, together with Austria-Hungary, bore a major share of responsibility.

The centenary debate

Christopher Clark's The Sleepwalkers (2012) argued that the war was a tragedy rather than a crime: a crisis with many authors, whose statesmen were sleepwalkers, watchful but blind to what they were bringing about. By widening the lens from Berlin to Belgrade, St. Petersburg and Paris, he gave new weight to Serbian nationalism and to the risk-taking of Russia and France. Sean McMeekin's The Russian Origins of the First World War (2011) and July 1914: Countdown to War (2013) pushed further: the real decision for European war, he argued, was made in St. Petersburg, where Sazonov and the generals began secret preparations on 25 July and the Tsar signed a general mobilization order on 29 July, encouraged by Poincaré's France. Critics reply that he treats reversible precautions as mobilization and glosses over Berlin's and Vienna's earlier choices.

Annika Mombauer, whose Origins of the First World War: Controversies and Consensus (2002) traces the whole debate, has defended the view that German and Austrian leaders bore the heaviest responsibility, because they chose to risk a European war when peace was still possible. T. G. Otte's July Crisis (2014) is harsher than Clark on the statesmen's competence: he describes a largely inadvertent war that came from a near-collective failure of statecraft, places much of the blame on the reckless miscalculations of Vienna and St. Petersburg, and presents the Kaiser's "Halt in Belgrade" as a genuine attempt at restraint.

Where the debate stands

Most specialists would accept a few propositions. Serbian officers helped plan the assassination, and Belgrade's nationalism worried Vienna with reason. Austria-Hungary chose to turn the murder into a pretext for crushing Serbia. Germany encouraged it and, once Russia moved, preferred a continental war now to a worse one later. Russia and France raised the stakes with their own preliminary steps and Balkan commitments. Britain's hesitation until 3 August left Germany uncertain of its stand. None of this was inevitable. The differences between historians are mostly of emphasis: whether to see the decisive choices as deliberate, as Fischer and Mombauer do, or as risks and miscalculations by men who did not believe they were choosing a world war, as Clark and Otte do, though they apportion the blame differently. Perhaps the most telling fact is how few people in July 1914 wanted a world war and how many accepted the risk of one.