Margaret MacMillan - The War That Ended Peace: The Road to 1914

Copyright 2013 by Margaret MacMillan

Maps on copyright 2013 by Mapping Specialists Ltd.

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House LLC, a Penguin Random House Company, New York.

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Published in the United Kingdom by Profile Books, London.

Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to use preexisting material:

Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Group, a division of Random House LLC, and Laird M. Easton: Excerpts from Journey to the Abyss: The Diaries of Count Harry Kessler, 18801918 by Harry Kessler, edited and translated by Laird M. Easton, copyright 2011 by Laird M. Easton. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Group, a division of Random House LLC, and Laird M. Easton.
All rights reserved.

Bodleian Library and Sir Brian Crowe: Excerpt from the Eyre Crowe Papers housed at the Bodleian Library, Oxford University, shelfmark MS. Eng. e.3020, fols. 12. Used by permission of the Bodleian Library and Sir Brian Crowe.

The Royal Archives, Windsor Castle: Two excerpts from Queen Victorias journals: RA VIC/MAIN/MAIN/QVJ (W) 4 August 1874 (Princess Beatrices copies) and RA VIC/MAIN/MAIN/QVJ (W) 22 June 1897 (Princess Beatrices copies). Used by the permission of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

MacMillan, Margaret.

The war that ended peace : the road to 1914 /

Margaret MacMillan.

pages cm.

Includes bibliographical references.

ISBN 978-1-4000-6855-5

eBook ISBN 978-0-8129-9470-4

1. World War, 19141918Causes. I. Title.

D511.M257 2013

940.311dc23

2013009274

www.atrandom.com

Web assets: Excerpted from The War that Ended Peace by Margaret MacMillan, copyright 2013 by Margaret MacMillan. Published by Random House, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

All maps except those noted above were created byMartin Lubikowski of ML Design

Jacket design: Gabrielle Bordwin

Jacket photographs: First Lord of the [Brisitsh] Admiralty, Winston Churchill, with Kaiser Wilhelm ll of Germany, Mirrorpix; Outbreak of war, August 1914, akg-images; Archduke Ferdinand of Prussia and his wife, Sophie, the day of their assassination, ullstein bild/The Granger Collectio

v3.1_r3

There have been as many plagues as wars in history; yet always wars and plagues take people equally by surprise.

A LBERT C AMUS , The Plague

Nothing that ever happened, nothing that was ever even willed, planned or envisaged, could seem irrelevant. War is not an accident: it is an outcome. One cannot look back too far to ask, of what?

E LIZABETH B OWEN , Bowens Court

Contents

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Introduction

L OUVAIN WAS A DULL PLACE, SAID A GUIDEBOOK IN 1910, BUT WHEN the time came it made a spectacular fire. None of its inhabitants could have expected such a fate for their beautiful and civilized little town. Prosperous and peaceful over many centuries, it was known for its collection of wonderful churches, ancient houses, a superb Gothic town hall and a famous university which had been founded in 1425. The university library, in the distinguished old Cloth Hall, held some 200,000 books including many great works of theology and classics as well as a rich collection of manuscripts which ranged from a little collection of songs written down by a monk in the ninth century to illuminated manuscripts over which the monks had toiled for years. In late August 1914, however, as the smell of smoke filled the air, the flames that destroyed Louvain could be seen from miles away. Much of the town, including its great library, went while its desperate inhabitants, in scenes that would become all too familiar to the twentieth-century world, struggled out into the countryside carrying what belongings they could.

Like much of Belgium, Louvain had the misfortune to be on the route of the German invasion of France in the Great War that broke out in the summer of 1914 and which was to last until November 11, 1918. The German war plans called for a two-front war with a holding action against Russia, the enemy in the east, and a rapid invasion and defeat of France in the west. Belgium, a neutral country, was meant to acquiesce quietly as German troops marched through on their way southwards. As with so much of what later happened in the Great War, those assumptions turned out to be very wrong. The Belgian government decided to resist, which immediately threw the German plans out, and the British, after some hesitation, entered the war against Germany. By the time the German troops arrived in Louvain on August 19 they were already resentful at what they saw as an unreasonable Belgian resistance and they were nervous about being attacked by Belgian and British troops as well as by ordinary civilians who might decide to take up arms.