Danse macabre

One month after Bosnian Serbs murdered the Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife at Sarajevo, Austria got around to declaring war on Serbia, 100 years ago today.

As I’ve mentioned, there was this convoluted Gordian Knot of alliances and expectations from the major powers of Europe and Serbia, with no country looking past the nose of its own interests to consider in any meaningful way what the hell they were putting into motion.

(Kind of like what we’re seeing right now in a couple of hotspots in Europe and the Middle East.)

During this 30-day period there was a whole lot of diplomatic back-channel consultation between Austria-Hungary and Germany, and between Russia and Serbia and Russia and France, with the British kind of flapping about in the background hoping everyone would just calm down.

There were a couple of places where an individual country might have thrown enough cold water on another to possibly engender some reconsideration. Primarily if Britain had made it extremely clear to Germany that she would indeed go to war if there was a violation of Belgian sovereignty; or if Germany had made even the most cursory reality check to Austria’s war-making capabilities.

But those moments were lost, and on 28 July, 1914 the Austro-Hungarian empire declared war on Serbia. Russia began partial mobilization (against Austria) the next day, but after Kaiser Wilhelm II warned his cousin Tsar Nicholas II that Germany wouldn’t stand for this sort of thing, Nicholas ordered general mobilization, to include facing Germany.

And there they were. The Germans began preparing to implement their strategy for a two-front war, which depended upon invading Belgium to give France a knock-out blow and…

Well, you know. No short, localized, profitable war could come out of that mess.