Europe's Last Summer Read Free

fed the rivalry between Austria and Russia that set off war in 1914.
1870–71. The creation of the German Empire and its annexation of French territory in the aftermath of theFranco-Prussian War made another European war likely as soon as France recovered sufficiently to try to take back what it had lost.
1890. The German emperor dismissed his Chancellor—his prime minister—PrinceOtto von Bismarck. The new Chancellor reversed Bismarck's policy of allying with both Austria and Russia to keep the peace between them. Instead, Germany sided with Austria against Russia in the struggle to control the Balkans, which encouraged Austria to follow a dangerously bellicose policy that seemed likely to provoke an eventual Russian response.
1890s. Rebuffed by Germany, and seeing no other alternative, reactionary, monarchical Russia was drawn into analliance with republican France. This convinced Germany's leaders that war was inevitable sooner or later, and that Germany stood a better chance of winning if it were waged sooner rather than later.
1900s. Germany's attempt to rival Britain as a naval power was seen in London as a vital threat.
1903. In a bloodycoup d'état in Serbia, army officers belonging to a secret society butchered their pro-Austrian king and queen and replaced them with a rival dynasty that was pro-Russian. Austrian leaders reacted by planning to punish Serbia—a plan that if carried out threatened to lead to a dangerously wider conflict.
1905. The First Moroccan Crisis was a complicated affair. It will be described in Chapter 12. In it Germany's aggressive diplomacy had the unintended effect of unifying the other countries against it. Britain moved from mere friendship with France—the Entente Cordiale—to something closer to informal alliance, including conversations between the two governments and military staff talks, and later to agreement and conversation with France's ally Russia. There was a hardening of European alignments into rival andpotentially enemy blocs: France, Britain, and Russia on one side, and an isolated Germany—with only halfhearted support from Austria-Hungary and Italy—on the other.
To some extent all of these were right answers. Other dates—among them 1908, which is discussed in the pages that follow—also served as the starting points of fuse lines that led to the explosions of 1914. All of them can be said to have contributed something to the coming of war.
Yet, in a sense all of them are wrong answers, too, to the question of why the conflict came. Thirty-seven days before the Great War the European world was comfortably at peace. Europe's leaders were starting their summer vacations and none of them expected to be disturbed while away. What went wrong?
All of the fuse lines identified by my students had been as dangerous to the peace of Europe in 1910 and 1912 as they were in 1914. Since they had not led to war in 1910 or 1912, why did they in 1914? The question is not only why war came, but why war came in the European summer of 1914; not why war? but—why this war?
Why did things happen as they did and not otherwise is a question that historians have been asking ever since Herodotus and Thucy-dides, Greeks of the fifth century B.C., started to do so more than twenty-five hundred years ago. Whether such questions can be answered with any accuracy remains debatable; often so many tributaries flow into the stream that it is difficult to say which is its real source.
In its magnitude and many dimensions, the First World War is perhaps a supreme example of the complexity that challenges and baffles historians.Arthur Balfour, a prewar British Prime Minister, longtime Conservative statesman, philosopher, and named sponsor of the Jewish state in Palestine, is quoted somewhere as having said the war was too big to be comprehended.
Not merely, therefore, is the explanation of the war the biggest question in modern history; it is an exemplary question, compelling us to reexamine what we