Imperialism, War, and Revolution, 1881–1920 541stronger than the chemical industry that stood behind
it; mass armies, and the total war that they implied,
only became possible when chemists devised ways to
manufacture millions of tons of explosives.
The arms race was accompanied by a popular mili-
tarism glorifying war. “Eternal peace is a dream, and not
even a beautiful one,” held one famous general. A book
entitled Germany and the Next War(1911) insisted that
“war is a biological necessity.” Writers everywhere pop-
ularized such attitudes. In the words of an Italian jour-
nalist, “We wish to glorify war—the only health-giver
of the world.” Or, in those of an American philosopher,
“War is a school of strenuous life and heroism.” Mili-
taristic governments produced elaborate plans for pos-
sible wars. German planners, for example, were ready
for an invasion of the British Isles or of Texas (support-
ing a Mexican invasion of the southwestern United
States), although they naturally lavished their most
meticulous attention, such as the creation of precise
railroad timetables, on plans to invade France.
The most famous peacetime war plan was the
Schlieffen Plan, named for the general who devised it
in 1892 in response to the Franco-Russian rapproche-
ment and the fear that Germany might have to fight a
war on two fronts at once. Schlieffen reasoned that the
Russians would be slow to mobilize, but the French,
able to employ modern communications and trans-
portation, would be an immediate threat. The Schlief-
fen Plan therefore directed the German army to begin
any war by concentrating all possible forces against the
French; a rapid victory there would permit defeating
the Russians afterward. To win that rapid victory over
the French, the plan proposed to start any war (without
regard to where it originated) by invading neutral Bel-
gium. As the German strategist Karl von Clausewitz
had explained a century earlier, “The heart of France
lies between Brussels and Paris.” The German plan for
marching to Brussels and then pivoting southward was
so precise that it included a timetable for each day’s
progress, culminating in a triumphal parade through
Paris on day thirty-nine. French war planners also be-
lieved that the next war would be decided by a rapid
offensive. Their 1913 regulations were straightforward:
“The French army, returning to its tradition, henceforth
admits no law but the offensive.” It was expounded
through a document known as Plan XVII, drafted by
French generals for the reconquest of Alsace and Lor-
raine. Most of the French army was to be concentrated
on the eastern frontier and then march into Alsace, but
French planners so poorly understood what an indus-
trial war would be like that they rejected camouflage
uniforms for their great offensive and dressed soldiers
in bright red trousers.The Balkan Crisis of July 1914
Europeans little recognized the gravity of their situa-
tion in the early twentieth century; their rivalries for
markets and empire, their nationalist ambitions and ha-
treds, their alliances and battle plans, their militarism,
and their crude social Darwinian belief in “the survival
of the fittest” all threatened the devastation of their civ-
ilization. Putting the matter most succinctly, Winston
Churchill noted, “Europe in 1914 was a powderkeg
where everybody smoked.” When yet another Balkan
crisis occurred in the summer of 1914, European gov-
ernments precipitated a monstrously destructive war,
known to contemporaries as “the Great War” and to
later generations as World War I. Some historians have
called it “the suicide of the old Europe.”
The Balkan crisis of 1914 began in the Bosnian city
of Sarajevo. A nineteen-year-old Serbian nationalist and
member of the Black Hand, Gavrilo Princip, assassi-
nated the heir to the Habsburg throne, the archduke
Franz-Ferdinand, during a state visit to Sarajevo in late
June. The Austrian government blamed the Serbian
government, which knew of the planned assassination
and did not stop it, for the murder. After securing a
promise that their German allies would support them in
a confrontation with Serbia—a pledge known as “the
blank check”—the Austrians sent a forty-eight-hour ul-
timatum to Serbia: The government must dissolve na-
tionalist societies, close nationalist periodicals, end
anti-Austrian propaganda, fire anti-Austrian members of
the government, allow Austrian investigation of the
crime inside Serbia, and arrest officials implicated. The
Russian government meanwhile warned that it would
not tolerate an Austrian invasion of Serbia. The Rus-
sians, too, received assurances that their allies, the
French, would support them—President Poincaré of
France was visiting Russia during the crisis and stood by
France’s staunchest ally. When Serbia accepted most,
but not all, of the ultimatum, the Austrians declared war
on July 28, 1914, exactly one month after the assassina-
tion in Sarajevo; they bombarded the Serbian capital,
Belgrade (which sat at the border), on the next day.
The Third Balkan War quickly became a general
European war. The Russians responded to it by order-
ing the mobilization of their army. Germany, whose
war plans were predicated upon the Russians being
slow to mobilize, demanded that the Russian army