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From the dean of modern military historians, John Keegan: a key selection from his masterpiece, The First World War. The road to World War I, from the death of the archduke to the first salvos of battle, an incredibly thorough and straightforward account of how a supposedly rational liberal Europe became engulfed by war.
Everyone remembers the powder keg, the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand and his wife by Serbian national Gavrilo Princip; but what about the fact that a full month elapsed between Princip’s deed and the actual beginning of war? Or that the German Kaiser spent much of that time on his imperial yacht Hohenzollern, on his annual cruise in the Norwegian fjords? John Keegan explains in careful and fascinating detail how exactly the war began, taking the reader through this fateful and exciting month of diplomatic back and forth, last-minute near-saves, and ultimate failure.
An eBook short.
Everyone remembers the powder keg, the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand and his wife by Serbian national Gavrilo Princip; but what about the fact that a full month elapsed between Princip’s deed and the actual beginning of war? Or that the German Kaiser spent much of that time on his imperial yacht Hohenzollern, on his annual cruise in the Norwegian fjords? John Keegan explains in careful and fascinating detail how exactly the war began, taking the reader through this fateful and exciting month of diplomatic back and forth, last-minute near-saves, and ultimate failure.
An eBook short.
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How War Begins - John Keegan
John Keegan
John Keegan’s books include The Iraq War, Intelligence in War, The First World War, The Battle for History, The Face of Battle, War and Our World, The Masks of Command, Fields of Battle, and A History of Warfare. He was the defense editor of The Daily Telegraph (London). He lived in Wiltshire, England, until his death in 2012.
Books by John Keegan
The American Civil War
The Iraq War
Intelligence in War
Winston Churchill
The First World War
War and Our World
The Battle for History
Fields of Battle
Warpaths
The Battle at Sea
The Mask of Command
Churchill’s Generals
A History of Warfare
The Face of Battle
The Price of Admiralty
The Second World War
Six Armies in Normandy
How War Begins
from The First World War
John Keegan
A Vintage Short
Vintage Books
A Division of Random House LLC
New York
Copyright © 1998 by John Keegan
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House LLC, New York, a Penguin Random House company. How War Begins
was previously published as part of The First World War, in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House LLC, New York. Originally published in Great Britain by Hutchinson, an imprint of Random House UK Limited, London, in 1998, and subsequently published in hardcover in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House LLC, New York, in 1999.
Vintage and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House LLC.
The Cataloging-in-Publication Data for The First World War is available from the Library of Congress.
Cover design by Joan Wong
Vintage eShort ISBN: 978-1-101-87363-2
www.vintagebooks.com
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Contents
Cover
About the Author
Other Books by This Author
Title Page
Copyright
How War Begins
Notes
In June 1914 the honour of Austria-Hungary, most sensitive because weakest of European powers, was touched to the quick by the murder of the heir to the throne at the hands of an assassin who identified himself with the monarchy’s most subversive foreign neighbour. The Austro-Hungarian empire, a polity of five major religions and a dozen languages, survived in dread of ethnic subversion. The chief source of subversion was Serbia, an aggressive, backward and domestically violent Christian kingdom which had won its independence from the rule of the Muslim Ottoman empire after centuries of rebellion. Independent Serbia did not include all Serbs. Large minorities remained, by historical accident, Austrian subjects. Those who were nationalists resented rule by the Habsburgs almost as much as their free brothers had rule by the Ottomans. The most extreme among them were prepared to kill. It was the killing by one of them of the Habsburg heir that fomented the fatal crisis of the summer of 1914.
The Habsburg army’s summer manoeuvres of 1914 were held in Bosnia, the former Ottoman Turkish province occupied by Austria in 1878 and annexed to the empire in 1908. Franz Ferdinand, nephew to the Emperor Franz Josef and Inspector General of the army, arrived in Bosnia on 25 June to supervise. After the manoeuvres concluded, on 27 June, he drove next
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