A CONTINENT ARMED AND WAITING FOR A SPARK

Begin with the map as it stood in the summer of 1914, because everything in this chronicle happens on it. Six states ranked as Great Powers: Britain, France, Germany, Russia, Austria-Hungary and Italy. A seventh empire, the Ottoman, still sprawled across Anatolia and the Arab lands, but nobody counted it among the real players. It was the "sick man of Europe," a phrase credited to Tsar Nicholas I in 1853, and the question of who would inherit its estate had haunted diplomacy for a century.

Germany was the new giant. Its population had grown from about 41 million in 1871 to about 67 million, and in 1913 it smelted 17.6 million tons of steel, more than twice Britain's 7.7 million and slightly more than Britain, France and Russia combined. Its chemical and electrical firms led the world, its army was the most admired in Europe, and its navy was the second largest afloat. Politically it was a curiosity: a Reichstag elected by universal male suffrage, with the Social Democrats its largest party since 1912, yet a Kaiser who commanded the army, appointed the chancellor and answered to no parliament.

Austria-Hungary, with about 52 million people, was the odd one out: a Dual Monarchy of two states under one ruler, Franz Joseph, on the throne since 1848 and now 83. No nationality made up even a quarter of the population. Germans were about 24 percent and Magyars (Hungarians) about 20 percent; the rest were Czechs, Poles, Ruthenians, Romanians, Croats, Slovaks, Serbs, Slovenes, Italians and others. Its army recognized some eleven languages, and its statesmen lived with the fear that nationalism would one day tear the empire apart.

Russia was the colossus: about 170 million subjects, the largest army in Europe, and an economy growing fast from a low base. But its railways were thin, its peasants poor, and it had lost the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–1905 and survived a revolution. With French loans it was building strategic railways toward Germany and expanding its army under a "Great Programme" due for completion in 1917, a prospect that alarmed Berlin.

France, with about 40 million people, had a stagnant birth rate and a grievance: Alsace and part of Lorraine, lost to Germany in 1871. Its answer was willpower. The Three-Year Law of August 1913 stretched conscription from two years to three, and army doctrine glorified the attack. France ruled the second-largest overseas empire, and French savers held a mountain of Russian bonds.

Britain, with about 45 million people at home and some 400 million in an empire covering a quarter of the globe, was the world's banker and shipper, the greatest naval power, and the only one of the six with a small professional army. It had no alliance with any European state, only ententes (friendly understandings) with France and Russia, and a deep reluctance to commit to a continental war. In the summer of 1914 it was also distracted by the threat of civil war in Ireland.

Italy, united only in 1861, was the weakest: poor in the south, short of coal and steel, quarrelsome. It belonged to the Triple Alliance but coveted Austrian-ruled Trentino and Trieste, and had secretly assured France in 1902 that it would stay neutral if France were attacked.

The balance of power, explained

The idea that kept the system running was the balance of power: no single state should grow strong enough to dominate the continent, and if one threatens to, the others should combine against it. It was why Europe had united against Louis XIV and against Napoleon. Britain, with the strongest navy and the smallest army, traditionally played "balancer," throwing its weight behind the weaker side so that nobody could win outright. The weakness of the system was that it only worked if the powers stayed free to shift partners.

By 1914 that freedom was gone. Instead of shifting coalitions there were two standing blocs: the Triple Alliance of Germany, Austria-Hungary and Italy, and the looser Triple Entente of Britain, France and Russia. Each had been formed to deter the other. The danger, which few saw clearly, was that an alliance meant to prevent war could also carry a local quarrel to every capital, because each ally feared that abandoning a partner would leave it alone against the rival camp.

Vienna, 1814–1815: the architecture of fear

When Napoleon fell, the men who gathered in Vienna had one overriding fear: that France, or revolution, would break loose again. Twenty-three years of near-continuous war had killed millions and bankrupted half the continent. Klemens von Metternich of Austria presided; Viscount Castlereagh spoke for Britain, Tsar Alexander I for Russia and Prince Hardenberg for Prussia, and the wily Talleyrand somehow talked defeated France into a seat at the table. Their Final Act was signed on 9 June 1815, nine days before Waterloo.

Their method was to ring France with stronger neighbors and to prop up legitimate monarchs. Belgium was joined to the Netherlands, Prussia was planted on the Rhine, Piedmont-Sardinia was enlarged, and Austria took Lombardy and Venetia. A German Confederation of 39 states, presided over by Austria, replaced the old Holy Roman Empire. Poland was carved up again, with the largest share going to Russia. Britain kept the naval bases it wanted. A Quadruple Alliance of Britain, Austria, Prussia and Russia pledged to uphold the settlement, and the powers agreed to meet in congress when trouble arose. Historians call this the Concert of Europe.

The settlement was conservative and often repressive, but it did its main job. Europe saw no war involving all the great powers for a hundred years. One consequence mattered enormously in 1914. After the Belgians broke away from the Dutch in 1830, the powers guaranteed Belgian neutrality in the Treaty of London of 1839. That piece of paper would one day bring Britain into the war.

1848–1856: the order cracks

In 1848 revolutions swept the continent within weeks. Louis-Philippe fled Paris in February, and in March Metternich himself fell in Vienna and fled to England. Liberals and nationalists in Germany, Italy and Hungary demanded constitutions and nations of their own. By 1849 nearly all had been crushed. The new emperor of Austria, the 18-year-old Franz Joseph, subdued Hungary with the help of some 200,000 Russian troops, and the Prussian king refused the German crown offered by the Frankfurt Parliament. The lesson Bismarck would draw was blunt: nations were made by power, not by speeches.

The first real crack in the Concert came with the Crimean War (1853–1856), in which Britain, France and Piedmont fought Russia, ostensibly over the protection of Orthodox Christians in the Ottoman Empire and in truth over the Black Sea and the road to the Mediterranean. It was a muddled, bloody affair, remembered for the Charge of the Light Brigade and a year-long siege of Sevastopol, and it killed perhaps half a million people, most from disease. Its political effect was worse. Austria, whose throne Russia had saved in 1849, threatened Russia instead of helping it, and Russia never forgave Vienna. The conservative solidarity of Russia, Austria and Prussia that had underpinned the Concert was dead, and the way lay open for those who wanted to redraw the map.

Count Cavour of Piedmont and Napoleon III of France went to war against Austria in 1859. At Solferino on 24 June, nearly 300,000 men fought a day-long battle in the heat; the dead and wounded numbered around 40,000, and the horror inspired a Swiss witness, Henri Dunant, to found the Red Cross. Garibaldi's Thousand then conquered Sicily and Naples, and a Kingdom of Italy was proclaimed in March 1861. Venice followed in 1866 and Rome in 1870. But Italy was left with unredeemed countrymen under Austrian rule in the Trentino and around Trieste, and the grudge, called irredentism, soured Austro-Italian relations until 1915.

In Prussia, meanwhile, King Wilhelm I appointed Otto von Bismarck minister-president in September 1862 to break a deadlock with parliament over the army. Bismarck won three wars in seven years. In 1864 Prussia and Austria together took Schleswig and Holstein from Denmark. In 1866 he turned on Austria, and at Königgrätz (Hradec Králové) on 3 July, Prussian breech-loading rifles, railways and Helmuth von Moltke's staff work destroyed the Austrian army: more than 40,000 Austrian and Saxon casualties against about 9,000 Prussian. Bismarck overruled his king and generals, who wanted to march on Vienna, and offered a lenient peace. He wanted Austria excluded from Germany, not turned into an eternal enemy.

Defeat pushed Austria into the Compromise (the Ausgleich) of 1867 with her Hungarian nobles. The empire became two states, Austria and Hungary, sharing one monarch and common ministries for foreign affairs, war and finance, each with its own parliament. Franz Joseph was crowned King of Hungary in Buda on 8 June 1867. The deal secured Magyar loyalty at the price of leaving millions of Slavs and Romanians under Magyar rule, and it turned Vienna's attention from Germany toward the Balkans.

Then came France. In July 1870 a quarrel over a Hohenzollern prince's candidacy for the Spanish throne gave Bismarck his opening. On 13 July King Wilhelm sent a report from the spa of Bad Ems describing a polite but firm rebuff to the French ambassador; Bismarck shortened the "Ems telegram" so that it read like an insult, and an outraged France declared war on 19 July. The southern German states joined Prussia. Moltke's armies, carried to the frontier by rail, won a string of victories, and at Sedan on 1 September Napoleon III was surrounded and surrendered with about 100,000 men. Paris held out through a four-month siege. On 18 January 1871, in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles, King Wilhelm was proclaimed German Emperor.

The peace, signed at Frankfurt on 10 May 1871, cost France Alsace and part of Lorraine, including Strasbourg and the fortress city of Metz, some 1.5 to 1.6 million people, plus an indemnity of five billion francs. The German generals insisted on the territory for strategic reasons; Bismarck understood that it would make France an implacable enemy, and spent the next two decades trying to keep France friendless. For the French the lost provinces became a national wound: for decades the statue of Strasbourg in Paris's Place de la Concorde was draped in mourning.

After 1871 Bismarck announced that Germany was "satiated." Having made the new Reich the strongest power on the continent, he wanted nothing more than to keep it safe. His great fear was France, which would never forgive the loss of Alsace-Lorraine, combined with any other power. In a memorandum dictated at the spa of Bad Kissingen in 1877 he named it his "nightmare of coalitions" (le cauchemar des coalitions). His answer was to make sure that France had no friends, and that every other great power needed Germany more than it needed anyone else. He was a juggler with five balls in the air.

Three Emperors and a scare

His first instrument was the Three Emperors' League of 1873, linking the conservative monarchs of Germany, Austria-Hungary and Russia in a loose pledge to consult. It worked until the first real test. In April 1875 a Berlin newspaper ran an article headlined "Is War in Sight?", reflecting German alarm at French army reforms and possibly inspired by Bismarck's wish to warn the French. Britain and Russia stepped in to calm things, the Russian foreign minister Gorchakov traveled to Berlin and let it be known that he had saved the peace, and Bismarck learned that Europe would not tolerate a second assault on France. He did not repeat the mistake.

The Eastern crisis and the Congress of Berlin

The next test came from the Balkans, where the Ottoman Empire was crumbling. A revolt in Herzegovina in 1875 and the brutal suppression of a Bulgarian uprising in 1876 (the "Bulgarian horrors" that Gladstone denounced in a famous pamphlet) led Serbia and Montenegro to attack the Ottomans and then Russia to declare war in April 1877. After a bloody siege at Plevna, the Russian army reached the outskirts of Constantinople, and in March 1878 the Treaty of San Stefano created a huge Bulgaria under Russian influence. Britain sent its fleet toward the Straits, Austria-Hungary threatened, and war between the great powers loomed.

Bismarck, calling himself an "honest broker," hosted a congress in Berlin from 13 June to 13 July 1878. It shrank Bulgaria, handed Austria-Hungary the right to occupy and administer Bosnia-Herzegovina, gave Britain Cyprus, and recognized the independence of Serbia, Montenegro and Romania. It kept the peace, but Russia felt cheated by the very man it thought its friend. Russian opinion blamed Germany, and in August 1879 Tsar Alexander II sent Wilhelm I a letter hinting at dire consequences. Bismarck concluded that Germany needed a firmer anchor.

The alliances

That anchor was the Dual Alliance, signed in Vienna on 7 October 1879. Germany and Austria-Hungary promised each other full support if either were attacked by Russia, and benevolent neutrality if either were attacked by another power. Wilhelm I, who loved his nephew the Tsar, resisted, and Bismarck had to threaten to resign to get his signature. The alliance was secret at first (its text was published in 1888), and it was renewed repeatedly. It lasted until 1918 and bound Germany's fate to Vienna's far more tightly than Bismarck had ever intended.

In 1882 Italy, angry at France for seizing Tunisia the year before, joined to form the Triple Alliance. The three promised to support one another against an unprovoked French attack on Germany or Italy, and to stay benevolently neutral if one were attacked by another great power. Meanwhile Bismarck revived the Three Emperors' League in 1881, but it collapsed in 1887 when Russia and Austria quarreled over Bulgaria. His last great stroke was the Reinsurance Treaty, concluded in secret with Russia on 18 June 1887. Each power promised to stay neutral if the other fought a third great power, unless Germany attacked France or Russia attacked Austria-Hungary. In a secret protocol Germany conceded Russia's influence in Bulgaria and backed Russia over the Straits. It was a treaty with the likely enemy of Germany's own ally, and Austria was not told.

The result was what historians call the Bismarckian system. For nearly two decades Berlin sat at the center of every combination, and the other great powers needed German goodwill more than they needed each other. It worked because one man understood all of it. The tragedy was that nobody else could, and the Kaiser who dismissed him in 1890 did not even try.

Dropping the pilot

On 15 June 1888, aged 29, Wilhelm II became Kaiser, the third emperor of that year. He was brilliant, restless, vain, prone to wild speeches, and determined to rule as well as reign. Born with a withered left arm, he compensated with an obsession with uniforms and ships. Bismarck, 74 and used to being obeyed, clashed with him over the socialists and over who held ultimate authority. On 18 March 1890 Bismarck offered his resignation, and two days later the Kaiser accepted it. John Tenniel's Punch cartoon "Dropping the Pilot" caught the mood: a young monarch watching an old man descend the ship's ladder.

The new men, Chancellor Leo von Caprivi and the shadowy Foreign Office official Friedrich von Holstein, thought Bismarck's juggling too complicated and too dishonest toward Austria. In 1890 they let the Reinsurance Treaty lapse, even though Russia was willing to renew it. Russia, left without a German partner, began casting about, and France, looking for a way out of isolation since 1871, was ready. French banks began lending to Russia in 1888–1889; the French fleet visited Kronstadt in July 1891, and Tsar Alexander III stood bareheaded while a band played the Marseillaise, a revolutionary anthem he otherwise banned.

A military convention was agreed in August 1892 and approved by both governments by January 1894. If Germany (or Italy backed by Germany) attacked France, Russia would attack Germany; if Germany (or Austria-Hungary backed by Germany) attacked Russia, France would attack Germany; and mobilization by any member of the Triple Alliance would be the signal for both to mobilize. France promised about 1.3 million men, Russia 700,000 to 800,000. The two-front nightmare that Bismarck had spent twenty years preventing now existed on paper.

Weltpolitik and Britain's awakening

Germany now turned outward. In December 1897 Bernhard von Bülow, soon to be chancellor, told the Reichstag that Germany demanded "a place in the sun." The policy, Weltpolitik ("world policy"), meant colonies, a battle fleet and a voice in every question from China to Morocco. Germany seized Kiaochow (Jiaozhou) Bay in China that November and won concessions to build a railway to Baghdad. It frightened others more than it enriched Germany, because what Germany reached for antagonized British, Russian and French interests all at once.

Britain, meanwhile, practiced "splendid isolation": no permanent alliances, a navy to keep the sea lanes open, and friction with France and Russia in Africa and Asia. On 3 January 1896 the Kaiser telegraphed congratulations to President Kruger of the Transvaal on repelling the Jameson Raid "without appealing to friendly powers," which British opinion read as German support for a Boer republic. In 1898, at Fashoda on the upper Nile, a French expedition under Major Marchand faced an Anglo-Egyptian army under Kitchener, and Paris backed down. Then came the Boer War (1899–1902), which Britain won only after committing some 450,000 troops, while newspapers and governments across Europe cheered its early reverses. Alliance talks with Germany in 1898–1901 went nowhere, so in 1902 Britain allied with Japan instead and began to settle its disputes with France.

Entente Cordiale, revolution in Russia, Triple Entente

The French foreign minister Théophile Delcassé wanted Britain as a friend. On 8 April 1904 the two countries signed the Entente Cordiale, a package of colonial deals giving Britain a free hand in Egypt and France in Morocco. It was not an alliance, but it ended a century of rivalry. By then Russia was already at war with Britain's ally Japan.

The Russo-Japanese War (1904–1905) shook Europe. Russia lost Port Arthur, was routed at Mukden, and saw its Baltic Fleet, which had steamed some 18,000 miles around the world, destroyed at Tsushima on 27–28 May 1905. At home, troops fired on a peaceful petition march in St. Petersburg on 22 January 1905 (9 January in the Russian calendar), "Bloody Sunday," and revolution swept the empire until the Tsar granted a parliament, the Duma. Russia, humbled, needed friends and French loans. Germany tried to exploit its weakness: in July 1905 the Kaiser talked Nicholas II into signing a defensive treaty on their yachts at Björkö, but neither government would stand behind it.

On 31 August 1907, after the Moroccan crisis (see below) had pushed Britain and France closer and Britain's fear of Russia in Asia had faded, Britain and Russia signed a convention dividing Persia into spheres of influence (a Russian north, a British southeast and a neutral zone between) and settling Afghanistan and Tibet. Like the Entente Cordiale it was no military alliance, but with the Franco-Russian alliance it formed a Triple Entente. Germans soon had a word for what they believed had been done to them: Einkreisung, encirclement.

In January 1907 a Foreign Office official, Eyre Crowe, wrote a famous memorandum arguing that Britain must prevent any single power from dominating the continent, and that Germany, whether it meant to or not, was drifting that way with a navy that threatened Britain's survival. Its logic guided British policy.

Few contests of the age did so much damage for so little cause as the naval race between Britain and Germany. The two countries had no quarrel that could not have been settled: no common frontier, no colonial claims that truly overlapped, and each was one of the other's best customers. Yet from 1898 onward the steel mills of the Ruhr and the shipyards of Kiel and Wilhelmshaven produced a fleet that British opinion came to regard as a loaded gun pointed at its head.

Tirpitz and the risk theory

Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz, appointed State Secretary of the Imperial Navy Office in June 1897, was the architect. He sold Germany on a battle fleet with the help of the Kaiser, who adored ships, and a mass Navy League that grew to over a million members. The First Navy Law, passed by the Reichstag in late March 1898, authorized a fleet of 19 battleships. The Second, of June 1900, doubled it to 38. The preamble to the 1900 law stated Tirpitz's "risk theory" (Risikogedanke): Germany did not need to match the Royal Navy ship for ship; it needed a fleet strong enough that even the greatest sea power would risk crippling losses by attacking it, and would therefore treat Germany with respect.

The theory had a fatal flaw. Britain, a nation that lived by seaborne trade, could not allow any rival to threaten its supremacy, and it had the money and shipyards to respond. The "risk" fleet did not make Britain respectful. It made Britain build, and it drove Britain toward Germany's rivals. In 1904 the energetic Admiral Sir John "Jacky" Fisher became First Sea Lord and began scrapping obsolete ships and pulling the fleet back from distant stations to concentrate it in home waters facing the North Sea.

Dreadnought

Fisher's masterstroke came in 1906. HMS Dreadnought, laid down at Portsmouth dockyard on 2 October 1905 and launched by King Edward VII on 10 February 1906, was ready for trials a year and a day after her keel was laid. She carried ten 12-inch guns in five twin turrets, instead of the four big guns and many smaller ones of earlier battleships, and steam turbines gave her a speed of 21 knots. She made every existing battleship obsolete overnight, and with them Britain's huge lead in numbers. But she also let Germany, which had been falling behind in sheer numbers of old ships, start level. A new race began, in which each country counted its fleet in "dreadnoughts."

Germany answered. Its Third Navy Law (1906) added large cruisers, and the Fourth (1908) raised the pace of battleship building to four a year. In 1909 the Admiralty warned that Germany might have 17 dreadnoughts by 1912, and the British press exploded. The Cabinet compromised on four ships at once and four more if needed, and the slogan "We want eight and we won't wait" echoed from music halls to the Commons. All eight were built. The scare was exaggerated, and Germany's actual building was slower, but it taught Britons that the German navy was aimed at them.

Talks and a lost race

By 1911 the race had become a financial strain on both and a diplomatic disaster for Germany. After the Agadir crisis (see below) Winston Churchill became First Lord of the Admiralty, in October 1911. In 1912 he floated a "naval holiday," a year with no new battleships, which Tirpitz refused. In February 1912 Britain's War Minister, Lord Haldane, went to Berlin to explore a deal: Germany would slow its program in return for a British pledge of neutrality in a continental war. Britain would not give an unconditional promise, only a formula that it would not join any unprovoked attack on Germany. The mission failed. Germany passed another Navy Law in 1912, and Churchill announced that Britain would keep a 60 percent superiority in dreadnoughts, a ratio of 16 to 10. In February 1913 Tirpitz said that such a ratio would be acceptable, as close as he came to admitting defeat.

Britain had won the race, but the cost was enormous. The contest had hardened British opinion against Germany. It had pushed Britain into a naval understanding with France in 1912, under which the Royal Navy concentrated in the North Sea and the French fleet in the Mediterranean, so that Britain was now morally committed to defend the French Channel coast. And it had starved the German army: only after 1911, humbled over Agadir and warned by Haldane, did Berlin turn back to land armaments with a massive Army Bill in 1913. On the eve of war Britain had about 20 dreadnought battleships and nine battlecruisers in service to Germany's roughly 15 and five (counts vary with ships still being finished).

Between 1905 and 1912 Europe passed through four crises, any of which could have become a general war. Each ended with someone backing down, and each tightened the knots of the two camps.

Morocco, 1905–1906: the Kaiser lands at Tangier

Morocco was one of the last independent states in Africa, and after the Entente Cordiale gave France a free hand there, Germany saw a chance to test the new friendship. On 31 March 1905 Wilhelm II reluctantly landed at Tangier and declared that Germany stood for the Sultan's independence. The move was meant to humiliate France and split it from Britain. It did the opposite. At a conference at Algeciras in southern Spain, from January to April 1906, Germany found itself backed only by Austria-Hungary, while Britain, Russia, Italy, Spain and even the United States sided with France. The French foreign minister Delcassé had fallen in June 1905, but France came out of Algeciras with its position in Morocco safeguarded. Meanwhile, in London, Foreign Secretary Grey authorized secret staff talks between British and French generals on how to cooperate in case of war.

Bosnia, 1908–1909: the annexation crisis

In 1908 a revolution by the "Young Turks" in the Ottoman Empire threatened Austria-Hungary's grip on Bosnia-Herzegovina, which it had administered, though not owned, since 1878. Austria's foreign minister Alois von Aehrenthal struck first. At a private meeting at Buchlau castle in Moravia on 15–16 September, he and the Russian foreign minister Alexander Izvolsky sketched a bargain: Russia would not object to Austria annexing the provinces, and Austria would support Russia's demand to open the Straits to Russian warships. Aehrenthal announced the annexation on 6 October, before Izvolsky had lined up support for his side of the deal. Britain and France would not back the Straits proposal, and Izvolsky was left humiliated and accused at home of being tricked.

Serbia was furious: it regarded Bosnia, with its large Serb population, as its own by right. Serbia mobilized, and nationalist societies were born, among them the Narodna Odbrana ("People's Defense"), founded in Belgrade in October 1908. Germany backed Austria without reservation. In March 1909 it effectively told St. Petersburg to accept the annexation or face the consequences, and Chancellor Bülow praised Germany's "Nibelungen loyalty" to Austria. Russia, still weak after 1905, had to give way. Serbia, abandoned, pledged in writing to live in peace with its neighbor. Austria had won, but at the price of long-term enmity. Russia vowed not to be humiliated again and began rebuilding its army, and Serbia nursed a grievance that Vienna had made permanent.

Agadir, 1911: the Panther's spring

The second Moroccan crisis began when France sent troops to Fez in the spring of 1911 to put down a rebellion, tightening its grip on the country. Alfred von Kiderlen-Wächter, the German Foreign Secretary, decided to claim compensation. On 1 July the gunboat SMS Panther anchored off Agadir on Morocco's Atlantic coast, supposedly to protect German business interests that hardly existed (the light cruiser Berlin followed days later). The real aim was to extract territory in the French Congo. The move alarmed Britain, which feared a German naval base on the Atlantic. On 21 July David Lloyd George, the Chancellor of the Exchequer and a reputed pacifist, warned in a speech at the Mansion House that peace at the price of being treated as a nation of no account would be intolerable for a great country.

Both sides stepped back from the brink, though the crisis dragged on through the summer and in September the Berlin stock market crashed amid fear of war. A treaty of 4 November 1911 recognized a French protectorate over Morocco and gave Germany about 100,000 square miles of the French Congo, attached to its colony of Cameroon. German nationalists felt cheated by a retreat. Britain's Committee of Imperial Defence debated on 23 August where an army should fight, and the military's plan to send an expeditionary force to France won out over the Admiralty's alternatives. Churchill was moved to the Admiralty in October. In France the more nationalist Raymond Poincaré became prime minister in January 1912 and president in 1913.

Tripoli, 1911–1912: the sick man attacked

Italy, jealous of France's gains in Morocco, took the opportunity to grab a prize of its own. On the pretext of protecting Italians, it declared war on the Ottoman Empire on 29 September 1911 and invaded Tripolitania and Cyrenaica (modern Libya), the empire's last African provinces. The war was a military sideshow, notable for the first use of aircraft in war: reconnaissance flights in October 1911 and the first bombs dropped from an aeroplane on 1 November. Politically it was a landmark. It showed that the Ottoman Empire could be attacked with impunity, and the great powers did nothing; Italy even kept the Dodecanese Islands it seized in 1912. In the Balkans, small states drew the obvious conclusion. The Ottoman Empire could be beaten, and the first to move would get the pick of the spoils.

Of all Europe's trouble spots, the Balkans were the most dangerous, because the interests of three great powers met there and a crowd of young, ambitious states pulled in every direction.

The Eastern Question

For a century the Ottoman Empire had been shrinking in Europe, and the powers had quarreled over its remains. Russia coveted the Straits (the Bosporus and Dardanelles), through which a large share of its exports, above all grain, reached the world, and it claimed to protect Orthodox Christians and fellow Slavs. Austria-Hungary, itself a multinational empire, wanted to keep the western Balkans out of Russian hands and feared a strong Serbia. And the Balkan states, Serbia, Montenegro, Bulgaria, Greece and Romania, each dreamed of a "greater" version of itself that overlapped with its neighbors'.

Serbia: a little kingdom with a big idea

Serbia, independent since 1878, was a poor country of farmers and pig breeders, ruled by the Obrenović dynasty. On the night of 10–11 June 1903 (28–29 May in the Julian calendar then used in Serbia), army officers led by Captain Dragutin Dimitrijević, known as "Apis" (the bull), stormed the Old Palace in Belgrade and murdered King Alexander and Queen Draga, throwing their bodies from a window. They put Peter Karađorđević on the throne. The new regime turned to Russia and France; Britain withdrew its minister until 1906 in protest. Serbia's politicians, led by Nikola Pašić, dreamed of uniting all South Slavs, including those inside Austria-Hungary.

Economic war followed. Austria-Hungary, which took the great bulk of Serbia's exports, banned Serbian pigs and cattle in 1906 to keep Belgrade in line, the so-called Pig War. Serbia found new markets, bought its artillery from France's Schneider-Creusot rather than Austria's Škoda, and learned it could survive without Vienna. Austria's formal annexation of Bosnia in 1908, which put nearly 1.9 million people (in 1910 about 43 percent Orthodox, 32 percent Muslim and 23 percent Catholic) under Habsburg rule, completed the break.

Young Bosnia and the Black Hand

Inside Bosnia a generation of high-school students, Serb, Croat and Muslim, read Russian revolutionaries and Mazzini and dreamed of liberation from Vienna. This loose movement was called Young Bosnia. Its martyr was Bogdan Žerajić, a young Serb who tried to shoot the Austrian governor in Sarajevo on 15 June 1910 and then killed himself; Gavrilo Princip would later visit his grave. In Serbia, meanwhile, a secret officers' society called Unification or Death, nicknamed the Black Hand, was founded in May 1911 by veterans of the 1903 coup. Its real leader was Apis, by 1913 chief of Serbian military intelligence. It ran networks of agents and smugglers along the border and cultivated links with Young Bosnia. Pašić's civilian government feared it, and in 1914 the two were locked in a power struggle.

Two Balkan wars

Italy's attack on the Ottomans opened the way. Under Russian patronage Serbia, Bulgaria, Greece and Montenegro formed the Balkan League in 1912, and in October they attacked. Serbs won at Kumanovo (23–24 October), Bulgarians at Lule Burgas (28 October to 2 November), Greeks took Salonika on 8 November, and the Ottomans lost nearly all their European territory. Albania declared independence on 28 November 1912, and the powers, at Austrian and Italian insistence, recognized it to deny Serbia an Adriatic port. The Treaty of London (30 May 1913) ended the war.

The victors quarreled over the spoils. Bulgaria attacked its former allies on 29 June 1913; Serbia and Greece beat it back, Romania invaded from the north, and the Ottomans retook Adrianople. The Treaty of Bucharest (10 August 1913) stripped Bulgaria of most of Macedonia. The real winner was Serbia, which grew by about 80 percent in area (from roughly 48,000 to 88,000 square kilometers) and gained confidence, though it still had no Adriatic port. Bulgaria, humiliated, became a potential partner for Germany and Austria; Romania, once Austria's secret ally, drifted toward Russia.

Austria concluded that a Greater Serbia was its most dangerous neighbor. Its Chief of the General Staff, Conrad von Hötzendorf, had urged war on Serbia repeatedly since 1908. In October 1913 Austria sent Belgrade an ultimatum demanding that Serbian troops leave Albania within eight days; Serbia complied. Within weeks Kaiser Wilhelm assured Foreign Minister Berchtold in person that Germany stood behind Austria and would draw the sword if necessary. The pattern for July 1914 was already visible.

The Liman von Sanders affair

The last prewar tremor came from Constantinople. In late 1913 the Ottoman government invited a German military mission under General Otto Liman von Sanders to reorganize its army, with command of the 1st Army Corps, stationed in the capital and guarding the Straits. Russia exploded: a German general overlooking the entrance to the Black Sea! A compromise in January 1914 made Liman an Ottoman field marshal and inspector general instead of a corps commander. But the affair persuaded Russian ministers that Germany was bent on controlling the Straits, and that Russia might one day have to fight for them.

Every continental great power but Britain relied on conscription. A young man was called up at about 20, served two or three years with the colors, then passed into the reserves, where he could be recalled until his late thirties or forties. The system was cheap: a small standing army in peacetime, an enormous one in war. The catch was timing. A peacetime army was a skeleton. War meant mobilization: the call-up of reservists, the requisitioning of horses and wagons, and the shipping of hundreds of thousands of men by rail to stations on the frontier, all by a schedule worked out years before. Whoever finished first could strike first.

Germany: Schlieffen and Moltke

Alfred von Schlieffen, Chief of the General Staff from 1891 to 1906, concluded that Germany, with the Franco-Russian alliance in place, would lose a long war against both. Its only chance was speed: knock France out in a few weeks, then turn the army east by rail to meet the slowly mobilizing Russians. France had built a belt of fortresses along its frontier, so Schlieffen's memorandum of December 1905 proposed to avoid it by sweeping through Belgium and driving on Paris from the north and west to envelop the French army, a modern Cannae. The right wing was to be made very strong. Legend has him saying on his deathbed, "Only make the right wing strong," but the story cannot be verified and is generally thought to be apocryphal.

Helmuth von Moltke the Younger, Schlieffen's successor from 1906 and nephew of the great field marshal, modified the plan. He kept the Netherlands neutral, as Germany's "windpipe" for supplies, which squeezed the right wing through the narrow gap at Liège, a fortress that had to be seized at once. He strengthened the left wing in Lorraine, and by 1913–1914 he had abandoned the old alternative plan for an eastern-first attack altogether. Whatever happened in the Balkans, Germany would attack France through Belgium first. Historians argue about how rigid the "Schlieffen Plan" really was, and whether it was ever a finished blueprint, but about the fundamentals there is no doubt: German mobilization led straight to Belgium, whose neutrality Britain had guaranteed.

France: Plan XVII and the cult of the offensive

France's Plan XVII, adopted in 1913 under General Joseph Joffre, chief of the General Staff since 1911, was less a plan of campaign than a plan of concentration: five armies along the frontier from Switzerland to Belgium, ready to attack, with the main thrust into Lorraine and a second into the Ardennes. French staff officers knew the Germans might march through Belgium but expected them to stay east of the Meuse, and underestimated how many men Germany would commit. Behind it lay a doctrine of "attack to the utmost" (offensive à outrance), popularized by Colonel Louis de Grandmaison, which held that morale and the bayonet could overcome machine guns. In 1914 French infantry still marched out in dark blue coats and bright red trousers.

Russia, Austria-Hungary and Britain

Russia's Plan 19, revised in 1912, had two variants: A, concentrating against Austria-Hungary, and G, against Germany. The Russians had promised France to attack Germany by about the fifteenth day of mobilization, long before their army was ready. Austria-Hungary's Conrad had plans for war with Serbia (Plan B, for "Balkan"), with Russia (Plan R) and with Italy (Plan I), and a railway scheme with a swing force of roughly a dozen divisions, the B-Staffel, to go against Serbia or Russia as the crisis dictated. The idea was elegant; in practice, as chapter III shows, it arrived late in both theaters.

Britain's contribution was an expeditionary force. After the Boer War, Richard Haldane, Secretary of State for War from 1905 to 1912, built a professional British Expeditionary Force of six infantry divisions and one cavalry division (about 100,000 men), backed by a part-time Territorial Force created in 1908. Staff talks with the French, begun in 1906 and deepened after Agadir, worked out where it would land and which railways would carry it. Officially Britain was committed to nothing. In practice, a plan existed.

The short-war illusion

Nearly all these plans assumed a short war, because the cost of keeping millions of men under arms seemed certain to force a decision in months. A few dissented. Ivan Bloch, a Polish-Russian financier, argued in 1898 that modern firepower would make attack suicidal and a European war end in stalemate, hunger and revolution. Norman Angell's bestseller The Great Illusion (1910; first published in 1909 as Europe's Optical Illusion) argued that war between industrial states was economically self-defeating. The elder Moltke had warned in 1890 that the next war might last seven years or thirty. But the younger Moltke had no alternative: Germany, hemmed in and open to blockade, could not win a long war, so it had to plan for a short one. The short war was less an illusion than a necessity, and necessity is a poor guide.

Governments make wars, but societies make governments, and the societies of 1914 were in a strange mood. The mood was part of the fuse.

Nation, race and struggle

The nineteenth century was above all the age of nationalism. In Germany, Italy and the Balkans it had built states; in Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman Empire it threatened to tear them apart; in France it made Alsace-Lorraine a sacred cause. Popular leagues multiplied. Germany's Navy League had more than a million members, and the Pan-German League, though small, shaped opinion far beyond its numbers. In Britain, invasion-scare novels such as William Le Queux's The Invasion of 1910, serialized in the Daily Mail, fed fear of German spies. Pan-Slavism told Russians they were protectors of all Slavs. The ideas of Charles Darwin, loosely borrowed, supplied a vocabulary: nations were organisms that must grow or die, and war was a test of fitness. General Friedrich von Bernhardi's bestseller Germany and the Next War (1912) called war a "biological necessity."

Empire sharpened the mood. Europeans ruled most of Africa and much of Asia and treated competition for colonies and prestige as a law of nature: the great powers expand or decline. They measured their security by whether their rivals grew. A rising Germany seemed a danger to Britain, a rising Russia a danger to Germany, a rising Serbia a danger to Austria-Hungary.

Militarism

Armies were national institutions as well as tools. In Germany the Kaiser commanded the army through a Military Cabinet outside parliament's reach, a reserve officer's commission was a prized social credential, and veterans' associations enrolled nearly three million members. The Zabern affair of November 1913 exposed the army's attitude: a young lieutenant in Alsace insulted local recruits, the garrison arrested civilians without legal authority, and the Reichstag voted 293 to 54 to censure the Chancellor. Nothing changed. In Britain the Curragh incident of March 1914, when officers in Ireland threatened to resign rather than coerce Ulster Protestants, showed how fragile civilian control could be. Only in France, a republic that had survived the Dreyfus Affair, was the army firmly under parliament.

Socialism and the dream of peace

Against all this stood the largest peace movement in history. Socialists in the Second International, founded in 1889, promised that workers of all countries would refuse to fight each other. The German Social Democrats won 4.25 million votes and 110 seats in January 1912, becoming the Reichstag's largest party. At an emergency congress in Basel in November 1912, as the First Balkan War raged, the International pledged to answer any war with mass protest; the French socialist Jean Jaurès was its most eloquent voice. Middle-class pacifists drew hope from the Hague Conferences of 1899 and 1907, from Andrew Carnegie's Peace Palace (opened in 1913), and from Bertha von Suttner, the first woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize, who died in Vienna on 21 June 1914, a week before Sarajevo. Yet it was hard to see how these movements would stop a war once governments began to mobilize, and many socialists were patriots first.

The War Council of 8 December 1912

On Sunday 8 December 1912, angered by a report that Lord Haldane had warned the German ambassador that Britain would not stand aside if Germany attacked France, Wilhelm summoned his military chiefs to his Berlin palace: Moltke, Tirpitz, Admiral Georg von Müller of the Naval Cabinet and Admiral August von Heeringen of the Naval Staff. The Chancellor was not invited. According to Müller's diary, Moltke said that war was unavoidable and "the sooner the better," while Tirpitz asked for a delay of a year and a half until the Kiel Canal was widened and a submarine base at Heligoland finished. The Kaiser sided with Tirpitz. Müller wrote that the result amounted to almost nothing.

Historians read the council differently. Fritz Fischer and John Röhl saw a rehearsal for 1914, a decision to prepare for war by summer 1914, confirmed by the huge Army Law of 1913 and the Kiel Canal's completion in June 1914. Others, noting that nothing concrete followed, call it an outburst of loose talk. Either way, it shows that the idea of a preventive war, to be fought before Russia grew too strong, was respectable in the highest German circles.

Arms and anxiety

Between 1908 and 1913, according to the historian David Stevenson, defense spending by the six European great powers grew by about half in money terms. Britain kept its army spending stable and Italy was distracted by a costly war in Libya, while the four big continental land powers answered one another's army increases in turn. Germany's Army Law of 1913 added about 136,000 men to the peacetime army, financed by a one-time property levy; France replied with the Three-Year Law; Russia launched its "Great Programme." Each build-up looked defensive to its authors and threatening to its neighbors, and each prompted the others to build more. The burden, a few percent of national income, was bearable, which meant that only politics could stop the race, and politics did not.