1914: History in an Hour. Rupert Colley

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      Contents

       Title Page

      Introduction

      Turn of the Century: States of the Nations

      Treaties and Alliances

      Assassination of an Archduke

The Road to War

The Willy and Nicky Telegrams

       The Schlieffen Plan

       Belgium

       Battle Begins

       Mons

       Marne

       The First Battle of Ypres

       Eastern Front

       Austria-Hungary

       War Crimes

       The Wider War

       The War at Sea and in the Air

       The Christmas Truce

       Appendix 1: Key Players

       Appendix 2: 1914 Timeline

       Got Another Hour?

       Copyright

       About the Publisher

       Introduction

      On 4 February 2012, Florence Green died. Born in Edmonton, London in 1901, she was 110 years old. Having been a member of the Women’s Royal Air Force, she was also the last veteran of the First World War. The ‘Great War’, as it was originally called, had truly passed from living memory into history.

      It all started in southeastern Europe, in the corner of the Balkans, an area known for its volatile tendencies but isolated enough for it not to concern the average person on the streets of London, Paris or Brussels, let alone the citizens of Sydney, Wellington or Madras. Yet within just over a month of the assassination of the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, as the efforts of negotiation and diplomatic bluffs failed, war had erupted, spreading across Europe then across the globe. But no matter, it would be a short war – finished before the fall of the autumn leaves or over by Christmas. Motivated by patriotism and nationalism, and peppered, in varying degrees, by ambition, prestige, fear, revenge, obligation or simply survival, nations went to war.

      In 1914, the war of people’s imagination lay in the previous century – colourful uniforms, military bands playing, flags flying and men on horseback, and short, sharp conflicts. But 1914 proved to be different, a watershed, as old notions of war were trampled in the mud. No one could have perceived such a war of unimaginable horror, fought on such an unprecedented scale; a war fought with terrifying new weapons, of death on an industrial magnitude, a war that involved so many nations and reached into the very fabric of society; a war that brought to an end the Belle Époque of Edwardian life. The events of 1914, and the war that followed, changed the world and shaped the twentieth century.

      This, in an hour, is 1914.

       Turn of the Century: States of the Nations

      Europe in the early twentieth century was a continent of superpowers and would-be superpowers. Motivated by ambitions of self-aggrandizement and self-preservation, they eyed each other with suspicion, envy and often fear bordering on the paranoia.

       Germany

      Germany was the cause of much of this fear. A unified country only since 1871, Germany, under the careful management of its chancellor, Otto von Bismarck, had rapidly built itself up into a modern, militaristic, industrial powerhouse. It looked to the colonial assets of its neighbours, especially the vast, sprawling empire of Great Britain, and set on a course of obtaining its own empire, colonies, its own ‘place in the sun’. And for that, it needed a navy that could rival Britain’s, whose naval supremacy had ruled the waves since the days of Nelson a century before. The German Kaiser, Wilhelm II, had, as a boy, admired the ‘proud British ships’, and wished as an adult to ‘possess a navy as fine as the English’.