Dan Snow's History Hit - How WWI Began

Episode Date: August 4, 2021

On August 4, 1914, Britain declared war on Germany and entered the First World War. This was a conflict of unparalleled savagery with industrialized slaughter on a scale that the world had never seen before. To commemorate this important anniversary Dan guides us through what led Europe and the world to choose war in 1914. He explores some of the many different reasons for war from the miscalculations and misguided beliefs of European leaders to the structural causes such as the role of capitalism and imperialism that helped bring about the conflict. As well as unpacking the causes of the war he also looks at its consequences which we are still living with today.  

This is History's Heroes. People with purpose, brave ideas, and the courage to stand alone. Including a pioneering surgeon who rebuilt the shattered faces of soldiers in the First World War. You know, he would look at these men and he would say, don't worry, Sonny, you'll have as good a face as any of us when I'm done with you. Join me, Alex von Tunzelman, for History's Heroes. Subscribe to History's Heroes wherever you get your podcasts. Hi everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History. I'm just sitting in the Western Solent, not far from where Mary Rose sank,

not far from the mouth of Portsmouth Harbour. I've just been into Portsmouth. I had lunch on board the wonderful destroyerortsmouth Harbour. I've just been into Portsmouth. I had lunch on board the wonderful destroyer HMS Dragon. Heard about their exploits on their recent deployment into the eastern Mediterranean. I definitely realised on that journey that lots of people listening to this podcast seem to be the Navy so it seems to me that looking at the number of people that download and listen to this podcast there probably aren't many people who aren't in the Navy listening to it. So welcome, everybody.

Great to meet so many of you on board Dragon. Thank you for listening. Today is the anniversary of Britain entering the First World War, of Britain declaring war on Germany, which it did at 2300 hours today in 1914, the 4th of August. It's a day that we thought we should note, we should commemorate here on the podcast. And so I've decided to record this podcast, a bit like the Spanish Armada one and the Bismarck one

earlier this year of me just talking about what led Britain what led Europe and the world to choose war in 1914 there's long been a debate why the first world war starts it's one of the most discussed and thought about questions in recent history there's course, a huge debate between the kind of contingency between the railway timetables, between Kaiser Wilhelm having a bit of a bad day in the office, between Konrad von Hotzendorf, the Austrian chief of staff, wanting to impress his married girlfriend, and, of course, the bad luck surrounding Franz Ferdinand's assassination

in Sarajevo in June 1914. But there's also deeper substructural factors, the arms race capitalism imperialism nationalism all that sort of stuff so in this podcast I try to unpack both of those explanations for war and tell the tale of how the world went in the words of David Lloyd George the British Chancellor from the clear blue skies of peace into the inferno one of the most terrible wars the world's ever known as you'll hear me say in the podcast we're still living with the consequence that war we're still living a world drawn by the victors wars the world's ever known. As you'll hear me say in the podcast, we're still living with the consequences of that war.

We're still living in a world drawn by the victors and the losers and the rebels and revolutionaries that came to the fore in that war. This is a story that we need to know and we need to understand. We've got lots of material, First World War, obviously on History Hit TV, on back episodes of this podcast. You can listen to all those.

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but in the meantime everyone this is how the world went to war in 1914 first world war was such a radical break with what had gone before it was one of the bloodiest and most destructive wars in history. It saw the collapse of some of the greatest dynasties of the last 500 years, the Romanovs, the Hohenzollerns, the Habsburgs, the Ottomans. It left great chunks of the globe, Eastern Europe, the Middle East, parts of Africa and Asia, in complete chaos. New states were drawn up, new settlements hammered out, many of which have proved enduringly unstable the last hundred years. The modern Middle East, as we know it, is born from the First World War. Communist Russia and its successor state, Vladimir Putin's Russia, were born in the war. The war facilitated the spread of

and led to the metastasization of Marxist ideas. The Marxist-Leninists, Lenin seized control of Russia. Marxist-Leninist students started the Communist Party of China a hundred years ago, all because of the gigantic chaos engine that was the First World War. The British and French empires were on the winning side, but were fundamentally weakened by the First World War. And America was reluctantly dragged onto the stage as a reluctant superpower and would play a huge, huge part in shaping the world subsequently. For the people of Europe and for the people of the world, the vast majority of whom were under European colonial control, the First World War would be an event that would reshape their societies, reshape their

world. And the outbreak of the First World War is so fascinating because it appears to be so contingent. If it hadn't been for that bullet in Sarajevo, if it hadn't been for the Archduke's driver taking the wrong turn, would there have been a war at all? In this podcast, I guess I'm going to talk about the outbreak of that war and how it was, at the same time, both a product of luck or bad luck, but also underlying factors that made Europe so dangerous, so vulnerable to a war of this scale and intensity at the beginning of the 20th century. As the Iron Chancellor, as Otto von Bismarck had said in 1878, Europe today is a powder keg and the leaders are like men smoking in an arsenal. A single spark will set off an explosion that will consume us all. I cannot tell you when that explosion will occur, but I can tell you where some damned foolish thing in the Balkans will set it off.

So this is a podcast, yes, about the spark, but also about why Europe and the world was a powder keg in 1914. Before I come on to the events, the countdown, what was going on in these few days of 1914, of June, July and August 1914, let's talk about some of those underlying effects. Let's start with the powder keg. Let's start with the kind of general situation of Europe in 1914. Brigadier General Henry Wilson was in British Army Staff College in 1910. He was a kind of rare thing in the British Army in that period. He was thoughtful. He was a scholar soldier. And at the British Army Staff College, he gave a speech in which he argued

that war was coming up. There was a likelihood of a general European war and Britain's only prudent option would be to ally itself with the French against the Germans. A student argued with him, saying that it was, quote, only inconceivable stupidity on the part of statesmen could precipitate a general war. This provoked the famous line from Wilson. He was derisive.

Ha ha ha, he laughed. Inconceivable stupidity is just what you're going to get. Why were they so stupid in 1914? I think one reason is a reason I've discussed recently on this podcast around the attacks made on democracy around the world. One simple reason is there was a generation of statesmen for whom a European war, not the frequent imperial struggles against people outside Europe, which were going on all through the 19th century. Britain, of course, earlier year in the 19th century, and Britain wasn't at war somewhere in the empire. France, in terminal campaigns in North Africa. Germany, brutal pacification genocide in Southwest

Africa and other campaigns. The Americans, obviously fighting indigenous peoples, Russians against Japanese. But a general European wars were rarer than they had been in previous centuries. The Crimean War pitted Britain, France and Turkey against Russia. The Franco-Prussian War had pitted the French against the Prussians and their German allies. But so-called general wars were rarer than they had been, for example, in the 17th and 18th centuries when the continent had been torn apart by titanic violence that touched almost every corner of the continent. And I do think there was a lazy assumption amongst Europe's ruling class that war would be impossible. Globalisation was occurring,

people were trading, studying each other's countries, marrying across borders never before. There was an assumption that the great wars, the great power wars of the past, were unlikely to happen again. But alongside that was a small but very powerfully placed group of men who wanted war who believed that war was a legitimate aim for states who believed it would be healthy who believe it might be bracing it might cleanse society who. It might cleanse society. Who thought it might return to society some kind of imagined past, a past of virility, religious observance, simplicity. And this existed alongside quite a wide popular view that war itself was legitimate.

I think that's important, that war itself was not some kind of awful aberration that many of us, hopefully all of us, feel today, but that war was a legitimate way of growing, protecting your empire, expanding, seizing new territory. These empires, the British, French, Austrian, Russian, German, yes, I'm afraid, even the American, had been born and survived and thrived through war. In the late 19th century, the Austrians and Russians eyed up the collapsing Ottoman Empire in Southeast Europe and the Balkans and thought it was inevitable that one day it would fall to one or both of them.

In the early 20th century, Britain and France thought nothing of resolving their colonial disputes, swapping bits of territory here or there, like Morocco. It was a totally natural thing to do at the time. Around 85% of the world was divided up between these European powers. And that meant there was bound to be constant competition along those colonial frontiers, and constant competition for bigger empires. Darwin's work had been corrupted into being thought to be applicable to empires, not just the evolution of species. There was an idea of social Darwinism. Unless empires evolved, unless they changed,

unless they struggled to become the fittest, they would be destroyed. It was the survival of the fittest out there. And that's part of the reason you see great militarization of society. You look at members of royal families across Europe. They're often shown in their military uniforms. Generals and admirals have given a much greater say in politics than they are now. And I think perhaps the most remarkable aspect of Pau de Keg is the sense that war in the end is inevitable. Everything is tending towards chaos. And that really underpins so many decisions

that were made in that summer of 1914. If you believe that great power war is an inevitable feature of life, the only ability you have to influence affairs therefore is to try and decide when, where and how that war should be fought. And so you see many politicians and military men thinking this might be a chance to fight a war. It could be quick, it could be fought on their terms, it could be fought against an enemy that they didn't think was yet ready.

But all of that is underpinned by this idea that war was coming anyway. It was felt by many of the men around the German Kaiser, it was certainly felt by leading members of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, but it was also felt by others outside the executive branch. The socialist orator August Babel said in 1911, the Gotten-Damerung of the bourgeois world is approaching. Too many people felt war was inevitable. One of my great lessons from the summer of 1914 is that war is not inevitable. It's us that makes it so.

Well, those are some of the factors leading to Europe being a powder keg in 1940, not others, of course. The military-industrial complex, we hear about that a lot in the Cold War context. It is certainly true that lots of people are making tons of money out of providing arms, munitions to the great powers. It was an arms race. Whether it's dreadnought battleships between Britain and Germany, whether it's the rapid industrialization of Russia, people selling arms to the Russian empire, there was money to be made. And sometimes it is true that gigantic arsenals of weapons, huge accumulations of military might start to develop their own momentum towards war. That's what they're used for. That's what the men are trained to do. And there's pressure on politicians to use these things, to let their dogs of war off the hook. There's also, of course, something that some historians find very compelling. Europe was ruled, in many cases,

by members of the same dynastic clan. Many of Queen Victoria's grandsons were on important thrones across Europe. Kaiser Wilhelm, her oldest grandson, always aware of his status as Queen Victoria's oldest grandson, always aware of his Englishness, inherited through his English mother, and somehow with a lifelong chip on his shoulder, he kept turning up to the Isle of Wight to try and win Cowleswick with faster and faster yachts. He never thought he was getting the respect he deserved from his younger cousin, King Emperor George V. And apart from whether they're all related or not, you've got the family politics that, let's be honest, we all feel those moments of wishing to plunge our family into total war. There are just the insecurities associated being

ruled by individuals, by flawed, idiotic human beings, which we all are. Autocracies in which decisions rest with one or two people, tiny groups of people, often with few safeguards, little oversight of what they're doing. These autocracies, I think, are inherently prone to making violent, decisive decisions and dragging the rest of us into war. And Europe was dominated by the great autocracies in 1914. Nicholas of Russia, Kaiser Wilhelm of Germany, and the ancient emperor Franz Joseph in Vienna, who I think exemplifies many things that I've been talking about. Very old, hugely pessimistic about the world that he was leaving behind,

hugely pessimistic about his empire's ability to survive, about the new politics, the nationalism, the socialism that was tearing his empire apart in so many different ways, and became convinced that war might be a way to turn the clock back, or at least stop the march of time and give his Habsburg empire another couple of generations of existence. And as everyone knows, it would be within that Habsburg Empire, within the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the spark would be ignited and in turn send the whole place up. On the 23rd of June, Franz Ferdinand, the heir to the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and his wife Sophie boarded a train in Vienna for Trieste on the coast. He apparently

remarked before he left, this thing isn't especially secret and I wouldn't be surprised if there are a few Serbian bullets waiting for me. He was heading to a part of his empire, Bosnia, recently annexed from the teetering Ottoman Empire. It was a polyglot province of the empire with Bosnian Muslims and Orthodox Slavic Serbs in there as well. Many of them dreamed of joining Bosnia to next door Serbia, a young ambitious state recently independent, hungry for more power and influence, hungry to absorb some of the Orthodox Serbs, Slavs in neighbouring Austrian provinces. The following day the royal couple took a dreadnought battleship

down the Dalmatian coast towards Bosnia. They landed and went inland. They made a quick visit to Sarajevo that night. Gavrilo Princip, a young man, a young would-be assassin, sponsored by rogue elements of the Serbian government, was in the crowd as the imperial couple went into a carpet shop for a browse. On the 27th, Sophie, Franz Ferdinand's wife, said to a prominent Bosnian who was trying to get them to cancel their trip, You see, you've made a mistake. It isn't really the way you say it always is. We're all over the countryside, and without exception,

the Serbian population has greeted us in such a friendly manner, with unrestrained warmth, that we're so happy about it. Your Highness, he replied, I ask God that if I have the honour tomorrow evening to see you again, you can tell me the same words, then a large burden will have fallen off my heart, a great stone. The royal team decide to go ahead with their visit to Sarajevo the following day. The 28th of June 1914, one of the most fateful days in history, was the day on which sparks flew. I've just recently done a podcast about that so please head back to the 28th of June in your feed and you'll see the podcast monitoring the movements of Franz Ferdinand and Sophie that terrible day and how their driver ended up in Sarajevo on a side street having made

the wrong turn, sticking his car into reverse, stalling it it allowing Gavrilo Princip standing two meters away by complete chance to fire two shots one into Sophie and one into the air to the Habsburg Empire. They both died and the Balkans and Europe was plunged into crisis. One of the terrible ironies of Franz Ferdinand's death is that he was one of the few men within the Austrian high command who actually did not believe that the answer to Austro-Hungary's problems lay within war. He once said, I shall never lead a war against Russia. I shall make sacrifices to avoid it. A war between Austria and Russia would either end with the overthrow of the Romanovs or the overthrow of the Habsburgs, or perhaps the overthrow of both. It would be unforgivable,

or perhaps the overthrow of both. It would be unforgivable, insane, to start something that would pit us against Russia. Well, his death did exactly that, because Austria was furious at Serbia and issued an ultimatum, and Serbia was locked in an alliance with Russia, its protector. After the war, members of the Austrian government admitted that they decided on war quite early. Emperor Franz Joseph wrote to Kaiser Wilhelm personally saying, you too will be convinced after the latest terrible events in Bosnia that a reconciliation of the conflict between ourselves and Serbia is unthinkable. The imperial foreign minister in Vienna, a man whose name is so long and impossible to pronounce for a useless Brit like me that I won't even try. He's called for short Leopold Berchtold. In the days following

the assassination, privately spoke of the need for a final and fundamental reckoning with Serbia. Another very senior Austrian, a hugely important man with responsibility for the outbreak of the First World War, was Franz Konrad von Hötzendorf. He was the chief of the general staff of the military of the Austro-Hungarian army before the war. And he'd been repeatedly calling for preemptive war against Serbia to rescue the Habsburg Empire, which he believed was nearing disintegration. He had various reasons for doing this. I think his natural pessimism is reflected by what he told his mistress in 1913. Our purpose ultimately will be only to go under honorably like a sinking ship. But speaking of mistresses, he had a particular ambition to go to war because as

he wrote in those terrible days, he said he knew it would be a hopeless struggle, he wrote, but it must be pursued because such an ancient monarchy and such a glorious army cannot perish ingloriously and his political views are very much informed by his personal views he had his own agenda which is hard to believe but he did his mistress was married to another man he wanted to marry her and he couldn't so shit catholic country couldn't get divorced he wrote to her saying his hope was for quote a war from which i could return crowned with success that would allow me to break through all the barriers between us and claim you as my own dearest wife. So there's a lot going on in Vienna, folks. There's a lot going on in Vienna. A hopelessly romantic, pessimistic idea that empire was doomed and it should go down with a fight has profited its glorious history and a

personal dimension in which the fight may imbue its protagonists with such personal glory they could achieve their romantic and other ambitions. The problem was you couldn't just attack Serbia with impunity because of its relationship with Russia. Russia might be drawn into the fight and therefore Austria-Hungary had to go to its big protector, its alliance partner, the German Empire. In 1882 Germany and Austria had signed an alliance, Actually, it was a triple alliance. Italy was involved as well. Germany had done so because it wanted to isolate France, keep France from reaching into Central Europe for allies. Austria had wanted support against the Russians, particularly in the Balkans, as the Turkish Empire slowly collapsed.

And so this alliance had been formed, which helped coalesce another alliance, that between Russia and France, the two powers it was aimed at. And so in the early 1890s, the French and the Russians were brought together, partly by this Central European alliance, partly because of shared economic and strategic interests. And so Europe was bound by these two interlocking systems of alliances. Everyone committed to come to the other's aid in the event of hostilities. And it's this process of triggering these alliances that would now dominate the rest of the summer and would be a big cause of the outbreak of the First World War. At the beginning of July, Berchtesgadet sent key emissaries to Berlin.

Germany was the greatest military force on the continent. A huge industry had overtaken Britain's in the late 1890s, surging ahead on most economic and military measures since its unification only a generation or two before. There, the diplomats held a series of meetings with Kaiser Wilhelm and his advisors. And there, critically, those Germans promised the Austro-Hungarians unconditional support for any course of action that Austria chose to adopt. It became known as the blank check. But not all this was clear in the rest of Europe, as Berlin was agreeing to let its ally do whatever it wanted, even up to and including dragging Europe and the world into total war. In Britain, things didn't look so bad.

On the 5th of July, Arthur Nicholson, the Foreign Office Permanent Undersecretary, said he doubted whether the Austrians would take any action of a serious character and I suggest the storm will blow over. Well, that's the kind of analysis we expect from our top civil servants. On the 6th of July, and this I think does give us an insight into much of the thinking, the fatalistic thinking in some quarters of Europe at this time, one of the principal advisors, the German chancellor, wrote in his diary saying, an action against Serbia can lead to world war. They all knew that. For a war which,

regardless of outcome, the chancellor expects a revolution of everything that exists. outcome, the Chancellor expects a revolution of everything that exists. Then he wrote, the future belongs to Russia, which thrusts itself on us as a heavier and heavier nightmare. There was this assumption, much worryingly, like you get today in certain parts of America around the rise of China, that the great power balance was shifting and this would ultimately prove disastrous to your own side. And therefore, a pre-emptive war, a spoiling war, was just the thing to do. Again, the British seemed unclear of this on the 17th of July. Lloyd George, the Chancellor of Exchequer, told an audience of London businessmen, although you never get a perfectly blue sky in foreign affairs,

he believed that the European problems would soon be solved. The British military, or some of them at least, did not share that rosy outlook. Smith Dorian, one of the senior commanders who would lead the BF into battle in just a month's time, addressed several thousand public school cadets at a summer camp in July, where he astonished a very jingoistic audience by asserting that war should be avoided at any cost. War would solve nothing. The whole of Europe and more besides would be reduced to ruin. The loss of life would be so large that whole populations would be

decimated. Some of the soldiers knew exactly what was coming. They'd seen new weapon systems. They thought about the effect on human flesh of the Industrial Revolution. They'd seen the battles of the Russo-Japanese War early in the 20th century and the American Civil War in the 1860s. They knew that mass groups of men marching into new, super-accurate, rapidly firing weapons would result in slaughter unlike any seen on the battlefields of the world. And they were right. You're listening to Dan Snow's History. I'm telling the story of how war broke out in august 1914 more after this romans gods spartans the wars of alexander the great successors in incredible entirely necessary detail the ancients podcast it's kind of like dan's show except it's just

ancient history we've got the leading experts. We've got the big topics from ancient Vietnam to the fall of Rome. Subscribe to the Ancients on History Hit wherever you get your podcasts. This is History's Heroes. People with purpose, brave ideas and the courage to stand alone, People with purpose, brave ideas and the courage to stand alone, including a pioneering surgeon who rebuilt the shattered faces of soldiers in the First World War. You know, he would look at these men and he would say, don't worry, Sonny, you'll have as good a face as any of us when I'm done with you.

Join me, Alex von Tunzelman, for History's Heroes. Subscribe to History's Heroes wherever you get your podcasts. On 23rd July, British Foreign Minister Gray said to the Austrian ambassador in London that a great power war would, quote, involve the expenditure of so vast a sum of money and so much interference with trade that it would be accompanied or followed by a complete collapse of European credit and industry. He went on to say, irrespective of who the victors were in the war, many things might be completely swept away. Britain was in a very interesting position. It was not formally part of any of the European diplomatic systems. Britain was, though, the largest imperial power in the world, one of the great industrial powers, and had the largest navy in the history of the world.

It had signed a series of agreements with France in the early 20th century, all of them dealing with imperial disagreements. But they had drifted closer. Their general staff, their military, their navy, their army had engaged in talks about what would happen if war was to break out with Germany. But it was ambiguous. The Germans thought the British would remain neutral, the French expected them to join them, and the British weren't sure. One senior British diplomat wrote, The Entente is not an alliance. For purposes of ultimate emergencies, it may be found to have no substance at all. For the Entente is nothing more than a frame of mind, a view of general policy which is shared by the governments of the two

countries, but which may be, or become, so vague as to lose all content. In fact, Britain would find itself drawn on the French side over the next few weeks. Towards the end of July, as it looks more and more like Austria would fight Serbia, the Russians had a decision to make. On the 24th of July, there was a Council of Ministers meeting in Russia, and a senior army officer said it would be an intolerable betrayal to allow Serbia to become. Russia had teetered on the edge of revolution in 1905, and the Tsar and his many senior military officers believed that a show of strength, a show of vitality was what was required.

They couldn't allow their little Serbian ally, their Orthodox Slavic brethren, to be absorbed by the Germanic Austro-Hungarian Empire. This was a reputational thing. And this is the complicated bit. The army chiefs convinced the Tsar that Russians would be able to mobilize, and that mobilization itself, gathering the soldiers together and marching towards the Russian frontier, would not be an act of war. However, the German Empire disagreed with that. They argued that Russian mobilization

itself was akin to a declaration of war. This would be a fundamental disagreement between the two that would be another factor, another little straw that would help break the camel's back and plunge Europe into warfare. That afternoon, the 24th, Serbia orders mobilization. Their chief of staff was Radomir Putnik. He was staying in an Austro-Hungarian spa, a spa in Hungary, in fact, and he'd left his country's war plans locked in a safe in his office in Belgrade, to which only he had the key. His subordinates had to blow up the safe in order to get the documents and the Austrians in a sort of last extraordinary courteous gesture allowed the general to return home across their territory, a kind of gentlemanly act that they would come to regret enormously. On that day, on the 24th of July, an Austrian ultimatum they'd issued ran out. After the death of Archduke

Franz Ferdinand, they'd issued a set of demands, all of which had to be accepted by the Serbian government. The Serbians agreed to nearly every single demand, apart from one that would have allowed Austrian officials to investigate the crime within Serbia, with impunity, to rattle around the whole of Serbian government and security forces conducting their own inquiry. It was seen as an unacceptable breach of Serbian sovereignty and they said no to that final demand. On the evening of the 24th of July, the Austrian ambassador left Belgrade, left Serbia, having refused to accept the Serbian counter-proposal. Everything now looks as if it depended on whether Germany would allow its Austrian ally to go to war, to invade Serbia. On the 26th of July, Russia placed its Polish

territories under martial law. It also issued pre-mobilization orders. Troops were told to start reporting to their depots. All restaurants in St. Petersburg were shut by 10 o'clock. Things were slowly taking on a wartime footing. Foreign Minister Gray in London proposed to the German ambassador that there was a solution to the crisis, a four-power conference. Berlin dismissed the proposal. Germany still believed that Britain would remain neutral in a war. Late on the 26th, however, Winston Churchill, the first Lord of the Admiralty, issued an order to cancel dispersal of the British fleet. The British fleet, the navy had been gathered together for summer exercises and was all about to head back to

various different ports. The fleet was told to stay together. On the 27th of July, Kaiser Wilhelm, who'd been taking an extended holiday in the Norwegian fields on his yacht, returned from his yachting trip to Berlin. He read the Serbs' quite humble response to Austria's ultimatum and declared he saw no more reason for war. In Vienna, they'd been taken by surprise almost by the near complete agreement of Serbia to nearly all their demands. And it was decided to take military action urgently before the calls for peace internally within the empire and internationally grew. To strike where I said the causes belli would appear to be Serbian government support for the men who'd assassinated the heir to the Austro-Hungarian empire and as a result on the 28th of July at 11am sitting at a little

writing table in his study, the old Emperor Franz Joseph signed a declaration of war. The document that he hoped would save his empire but in fact would prove its own death warrant. Britain in response sent its fleet to Scarpa Flow in the Orkney Islands, a base from which it could better police the North Sea, blockade the German coast. And Churchill wrote to his wife, My darling one and beautiful, everything tends towards catastrophe and collapse. I am interested, geared up and happy. The Kaiser responded to this sudden Austrian declaration of war by writing,

The ball that is rolling can no longer be stopped. It's one of the great tragedies of world history that the Kaiser did not feel able at that point to stop the ball rolling. There were voices who knew exactly what was coming. They weren't listened to. One social democratic German politician declared that only immature adolescents could be attracted to a warrior adventure that must turn Europe into a slaughterhouse stinking of blood and decay. The French writer André Guide, on the 28th July 1914, said we are readying

ourselves to enter a long tunnel full of blood and darkness. He wasn't wrong. On the following day, the 29th at dawn, in the capital of Serbia, Belgrade, the citizens were awakened by shellfire in the direction of the riverside frontier fortress of Zemun. A few hours later, Austrian ships steamed down the Danube and began shelling the Serb capital, hitting some buildings near the cathedral. It was the start of a war that would destroy Serbia in many ways. It would cost the life of three-quarters of a million Serbs, nearly 20% of the population, by far the highest proportion of the population of any belligerent nation to perish during the upcoming First World War. The following day at three in the morning, the German Chancellor telegraphed Vienna urging diplomatic mediation. He'd been panicked by thoughts that the Brits might enter the war on the French side. Incredibly though, other elements within the German hierarchy, von Moltke, who was effectively in command of the German army,

telegraphed the Austrians telling them to reject mediation, to go for it, to ratchet up their warlike preparations. The Austrians ignored the German Chancellor's telegram. The ambiguities within Germany, the confusion about whether the politicians, the military or the Kaiser himself was in charge in these days leading to the outbreak of war was a key element in the slide towards conflict. At five o'clock that afternoon on the 29th Moscow time, Tsar Nicholas having attempted to pull back, having attempted to step away from the brink, he's bullied into mobilization. He signs the general order due to take effect the following morning of the 30th. On the 31st, news of Russian mobilization arrives in Berlin and there are smiles and handshakes in the war

ministry all around. Russia now looks like the aggressor. Germany will have the war that many of its politicians wanted, a pre-emptive war against Russia, while Germany was still a stronger military force, but it would look like Russia had started it. The following day at five o'clock in Berlin, the Kaiser signs the order to mobilize the German army in his palace and orders champagne. A message was sent to Russia saying, since both empires are now in a state of mobilization,

a state of war existed between them. Back in London the Prime Minister Herbert Asquith was furious although curiously seemed more angry about having to cancel a weekend in the country in the company of Nisha Stanley a 26 year old woman who he admired enormously. It's not clear whether it was a consummated romance or not. He wrote to her I can honestly say I've never had a more bitter disappointment there would be greater disappointments to come. On the second of August the following day, Germany suddenly issued a demand that Belgium allow its armies the right to march through the country. Now this is a bit that is confusing to many. Russia and Germany were in a state of war in the east, lining up behind their allies Austria-Hungary and Serbia in the

Balkans. So far, that makes sense. However, Germany's first act would be to attack in the west. That's because Germany only had one plan, an inflexible concept. The idea was, if you end up fighting Russia or France, they're locked into this alliance, you end up fighting both. So your war plan should reflect that. No matter where the war starts or who it's primarily with, the war plan dictated that you attack the French first and then move to the Russians. It was thought the Russians would be slower to mobilize. They had a less efficient railway network. Their military was less modernized. You need to launch an overwhelming attack against France first, take Paris, knock out the French as they had done during the Franco-Prussian war of the 1870s, and then use your internal rail network to move huge amounts of your forces east

to fight the Russian slow-moving war machine. However, the German border with France was highly fortified. The French had spent vast amounts of treasure turning that border into a killing zone and the obvious place to attack into France was therefore through Belgium but Belgium was neutral and its neutrality was protected by many signatories to a treaty of neutrality one of which was Britain. In order to defeat France the German military decided they had to march through Belgium even if that involved bringing Britain into the war against them. The decision to invade Belgium was made by the military for military purposes. The politicians didn't feel able to overrule them and say that bringing Britain into

the war against Germany would be a strategic disaster. Instead, while the military prepared for an invasion of Belgium, the politicians were left just hoping that Britain would choose to remain neutral. On the 3rd of August, the following day, at seven in the morning, Belgium rejected Germany's ultimatum. They would not let German armies march across their territory. In London that day, the Times declared that Europe is to be the scene of the most terrible war that she has witnessed since the fall of the Roman Empire. The blame was full mainly upon Germany. She could have stayed the plague had she chosen to speak to Vienna as she speaks when she is in earnest. She has not chosen to do so. At 11am, the British cabinet met to discuss the German ultimatum to Belgium and its

rejection. David Lloyd George, a man who'd made his name in radical liberal politics in opposition to the Boer War, as in many ways an anti-imperialist, reluctantly swapped sides when it became clear that a small neutral country was about to have its neutrality violated by a vast military autocracy. At three o'clock in the afternoon, Foreign Minister Gray stopped in the House of Commons to make the first, if you can believe this, the first formal statement by the British government since the start of the crisis. He spoke for 75 minutes. Could this country stand by, he said, and watch the most direct crime that ever stained the face of history and thus become participators in the sin? Britain had opted for war against Germany. In the early evening of the 3rd of August,

the German ambassador in Paris issued a declaration of war, full of fake news about how French aircraft had bombed Nuremberg. The French army immediately began its offensive into German territory, into what it called the Lost Provinces of Alsace-Lorraine, which had been annexed by Prussia after its victory in 1871. It was the start of fighting in the West. On the 4th of August, the first German troops crossed into Belgium, and at midday, the King of Belgium formally asked Britain to help in accordance with its treaty obligations. That day, the Kaiser summoned the deputies of the Reichstag, the members of Parliament, to his palace

in Berlin Kaiser Wilhelm had been decked out as the supreme German warlord dressed in his full uniform and he told the deputies from the bottom of my heart I thank you for your expressions of love and fidelity in the struggle now ahead of us I see no more parties in my folk among us there are only Germans this is a full realization of the Kaiser's fever dream, of an end to partisan squabbling, a moment of national unity, focused on the body of the emperor, of the Kaiser himself. This was war as a unifying national crusade. There was wild applause. a unifying national crusade. There was wild applause.

Even the socialist deputies had been convinced that this was a war of Russian aggression, a war to protect the fatherland. In St. Petersburg, meantime, the empty German embassy was stormed by a mob, its caretaker killed. This is History's Heroes. People with purpose, brave ideas, and the courage to stand alone. Including a pioneering surgeon who rebuilt the shattered faces of soldiers in the First World War.

You know, he would look at these men and he would say, don't worry, Sonny, you'll have as good a face as any of us when I'm done with you. Join me, Alex von Tunzelman, for History's Heroes. Subscribe to History's Heroes wherever you get your podcasts. A senior German military officer, Falkenhayn, who would rise to supreme command in 1915, told the German Chancellor, even if we go under as a result of this, it was beautiful. I find that kind of romantic fatalism that you get in Berlin, in Moscow, in Vienna, so, so distressing, as these countries are tipped into the most terrible war, a war that would see all of their dynasties, all

their empires collapse. Prime Minister Askos is feeling altogether less excited about the war, perhaps reflecting the primacy of civilians within the British government. He wrote, Winston, who has got on all his war paint, is longing for a sea fight in the early hours of tomorrow morning. The whole thing fills me with sadness. In the afternoon of the 4th of August, King George V proclaimed mobilisation. At seven o'clock, the British ultimatum to Germany was announced. It required an answer by 2300 hours British time and demanded that German troops withdraw from Belgian soil. When the British ambassador delivered it in Berlin, the German chancellor said his blood boiled. Britain was to fight all of it for just a word, neutrality,

just for a scrap of paper. At 10 o'clock the british cabinet sat together in downing street waiting for big ben to chime those chimes came at 11 the british ultimatum had expired at 11 20 the british war telegram was sent across the british empire ships bases units were told that britain was now in a state of war against Germany. On the continent gigantic armies clashed. A revolution in communication, in food, logistics, medicine. The revolutions of the 19th century and early 20th century ensured that war could now be fought on an imaginable scale. In just 300 hours for example 11,000 German trains carried 2.2 million men and 600,000 horses across Germany to concentration areas in the frontiers of France, Belgium and Luxembourg.

That mighty force crossed the Rhine towards the frontier into battle at the rate of 560 trains a day. Each one of those trains had 54 wagons. When that army clashed with the French, with the Belgians, the slaughter would be prodigious. One of the early German attacks against Liège, a Belgian officer wrote, as line after line of German infantry advanced, we simply mowed them down. They made no attempt at deploying but came on, almost shoulder to shoulder, until we shot them down. The fallen were heaped on top of one another, an awful barricade of dead and wounded men. In Britain, the decision was made to send four infantry divisions plus a cavalry division to France. Sir John French was given command, so the British army went to Belgium in 1914 to fight Germans

commanded by an Irishman called French. Some crowds cheered in British cities, but there was dissenting views as well. C.P. Scott argued in the Manchester Guardian, by some hidden contract England has been technically committed behind her back to the ruinous madness of a share in the violent gamble of war between two militarist leagues. It will be a war in which we risk everything of which we are proud and in which we stand to gain nothing. Someday we will regret it. The Bishop of London declared this the greatest fight ever made for the Christian religion, a choice between the nailed hand and the mailed fist. While George Bernard Shaw wrote an article begging both sides to shoot their officers and go home. In Madame Tussauds' waxworks museum, the model of the Kaiser

was moved from its royal gallery and put in its chamber of horrors, while Kaiser Wilhelm, furious that the British had declared war against Germany, dispatched his uniforms as a British Admiral of the Fleet and Field Marshal to Buckingham Palace. No one listening to this needs any reminder of the horrors, the bloodshed of the First World War, but it's worth just quickly talking about the immediate consequences of that march to war. In the month that followed the outbreak of the First World War, the French army suffered casualties on a scale never surpassed by any nation in a single day. The French armies marched towards the Germans under regimental colours flying, flags flying, the music of drums and trumpets, units deployed with full bands, officers, some officers wore white gloves.

The troops were into action by commanders on chargers. The troops marched with red trousers. They looked like something out of a picture book a German witness wrote home. picture book a German witness wrote home. On just one day, the 22nd of August, the French army lost 27,000 men killed, not including wounded and missing, some of the most astonishing casualty figures in history. Those initial battles of the summer and autumn of 1914 are not the battles that we tend to remember, but for the French in particular were the bloodiest battles of the First World War. They lost over a million casualties in 1914, including a third of a million dead. One French soldier whose company entered its first battle in August with 82 men had, by the end of the month, just three men left alive and unwounded. The Germans also suffered 800,000 casualties in the first few months of the war. The British began small. Their first battle

was at Mons in Belgium on the 23rd. But by the end of the year, the very small professional British army had been bled white. Britain had lost nearly 100,000 men killed or wounded in the fighting in France and Belgium. And it was only the start. Over the next four years, war, society, the world would be changed dramatically. Nothing would be the same again in 1918. And we are still living with the consequences of that march to war in the summer of 1914. That war was a product both of decisions, luck, foibles, the characteristics of the individuals involved in making that decision, but also the context,

the nature of the world in which those decisions, those events were taking place. And it's the interplay between the two that I find so fascinating. Around 70 million men would be mobilized, perhaps between 9 and 14 million military and civilian deaths result. 14 million military and civilian deaths result and there were genocides for example the Armenians in Turkey and the appalling casualties of the great influenza so-called Spanish flu which latest research seems to suggest was born may have mutated may have taken hold in those gigantic camps of armed men and is therefore a direct consequence of the first world war as well camps of armed men and is therefore a direct consequence of the First World War as well. Andrea Zom was still living in a world shaped by the events of the summer of 1914. Thank you very much for listening to this podcast. See you next time. I feel the hand of history upon our shoulders.

All this tradition of ours, our school history, our songs, this part of the history of our country, all were gone and finish. Thanks folks for listening to this episode of Danston's History. As I say all the time, I love doing these podcasts. They are the best thing I do professionally. I feel very lucky to have you listening to them. If you fancied giving them a rating review, obviously the best rating review possible would be ideal. It makes a big difference to us. I know it's a pain, but we'd really, really be grateful. And if you want to listen to the other podcasts

in our ever-increasing stable, don't forget we've got Susanna Lipscomb with Not Just the Tudors. That's flying high in the charts. We've got our Medieval podcast, Gone Medieval, the brilliant Matt Lewis and Kat Jarman. We've got The Ancients with our very own Tristan Hughes. And we've got Warfare as well,

dealing with all things military. Please go and check those out wherever you get your pods. This is History's Heroes. People with purpose, brave ideas, and the courage to stand alone, including a pioneering surgeon

who rebuilt the shattered faces of soldiers in the First World War. You know, he would look at these men and he would say, don't worry, Sonny, you'll have as good a face as any of us when I'm done with you. Join me, Alex von Tunzelman, for History's Heroes. Subscribe to History's Heroes wherever you get your podcasts.