In Europe

next few years, Russia would have an exemplary fleet in the Baltic, rail connections up to the German border and an army bigger than anything Germany could hope to equal. ‘Every year we wait lessens our chances,’ General Helmuth von Moltke announced in spring 1914, to anyone who cared to listen.
    The motives of the French, however, had more to do with the past: revenge for the humiliations that had followed the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–1, and the reclamation of their former glory. The Austrians wanted, above all, to deal once and for all with rebel Serbia. ‘
Serbien muss sterben
,’ the students shouted. And besides, a military injection could do their teetering monarchy no harm. For years the squares of Moscow and St Petersburg had been crowded with excited nationalists who wanted toprotect their Serb brothers from Austria. What's more, Russia was feeling increasingly threatened by Germany. Turkey, on the other hand, took part because it was in desperate need of German support against its old enemy, Russia.
    Great Britain was a special case. The British government hesitated for an unusually long time. There are those who say that this long hesitation was itself one of the causes of the war: had Wilhelm known beforehand that Britain would join the fray, he would never have started the conflict so lightly. As late as 1 August, it was still almost certain – according to notes made by the young naval minister, Winston Churchill – that the United Kingdom would remain neutral. More than three quarters of cabinet ministers were determined not to let the country be dragged into any European conflict. By 3 August, however, the majority of the cabinet considered war to be inevitable. The British had always seen Antwerp as ‘the pistol aimed at Europe's heart’, and as more and more reports came in about German ultimatums to neutral Belgium, the mood shifted with each passing hour. Now that Germany was pushing the fulcrum of war to the west, there was far more at stake than simply a few treaties. Now it was about the balance of power, about turning the tide of Wilhelm's imperial ambitions, and above all about maintaining the old division of power: balance within Europe, Britain outside Europe. In addition, there was also the momentum of the country's own military planning, a genie that could scarcely be put back into the bottle. During summer 1914, a mechanism had been set in motion among all the world's powers that, after only a few days, could no longer be brought to a halt: the network of war plans, the enormous maze of scenarios that had been developed decades earlier and which would ultimately act as gigantic flywheels, as prophesies bringing about their own fulfilment.
    These war plans were a new phenomenon. As detailed as railway timetables, they also had everything to do with the railways themselves. The capacity of the national rail networks had been calculated precisely: the number of foot soldiers a railway could accommodate each day, which trunk lines could be used in the case of an advance, and the number of days it would take to conquer a given stronghold.
    This rigid military planning had catastrophic political effects. As soon as one of the powers mobilised, the others could only follow. An armythat arrived at the front one week late would already have lost half the war. The French chief of staff Joseph Joffre warned in 1914 that, according to his calculations, every day the mobilisation was postponed equalled a twenty-five-kilometre-wide swathe of territory surrendered to the enemy. The German general staff made a similar claim. By early August 1914, the government leaders were the only ones who could stop the ticking clock. They realised too late what was happening, failed and panicked.
    Most of my final day in Vienna is spent in the cellars of the Neue Hofburg, in the warm shelter of the National Library. In what state of mind did the common man in his Viennese café, drinking his coffee and reading his paper, view this oncoming world war? Did he, on 28 June, 1914, have any clue that Gavrilo Princip's potshots at Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie had signalled the onset of a series of catastrophic years?
    Later it was suggested that he did, but the back editions of the
Neue Freie Presse
tell a different story. I read them one after the other, day by day, for the months of June, July and August 1914.
    True destiny is often as trivial as the plot of a disaster movie. First there is normal