Ninety-five years ago the chain of events begun in a farce-like assassination ground into a series of declarations of war ending with that of Great Britain on Germany on 4 August 1914.
And the stage was set for more than four years of horror Europe hadn’t seen since the Thirty Years War. In fact, take the carnage of that imperial conflict, freeze it primarily over Northern France/Belgium like a stalled weather system, add in such vastly improved killing technology as machine guns and rifled artillery and you have a recipe for 20,000,000 dead, billions in war debt and dragons’ teeth sown for the next conflagration 20 years down the road.
Between the murder of Franz Ferdinand and his consort Sophie by Bosnian dupes of the Serbs on 28 June and the final diplomatic gloved slaps (and the immediate invasion by Germany of Belgium without a declaration of war) there were Byzantine machinations and all manner of monarchical posturing (largely by Wilhelm II).
But really—once the partial and general mobilizations had been ordered in the various empires the rest was just filling in the gaps.
Anyhow—this is a good occasion to consider how momentum builds for something like this when there are testosterone-clouded minds in charge of states.
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