Read Catastrophe 1914: Europe Goes to War for Free Online

rage about its manner. Most of his subjects shared his sentiments, or lack of them. On 29 June in Vienna, Professor Josef Redlich noted in his diary: ‘there is no sense of grief in the town. Music has been playing everywhere.’ The London Times reported the funeral on 1 July in terms measured to the point of somnolence. Its Vienna correspondent asserted that ‘so far as the press is concerned, there is a remarkable absence of any inclination that revenge should be taken upon the Serbs of the Monarchy as a whole for the misdeeds of what is believed to be a small minority … With regard to Serbia also the utterances of the press are on the whole remarkably restrained.’
    Foreign observers expressed surprise that Viennese mourning for the heir to the imperial throne was perfunctory and patently insincere. It was thus ironic that the Hapsburg government scarcely hesitated before taking a decision to exploit the assassinations as a justification for invading Serbia, even at the cost of provoking an armed collision with Russia. And Princip had killed the one man in the Empire committed to avert this.

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    ‘A Feeling that Events are in the Air’
    1 CHANGE AND DECAY
    One day in 1895, a young British army officer lunched in London with the old statesman Sir William Harcourt. After a conversation in which the guest took, by his own account, none too modest a share, Lt. Winston Churchill – for it was he – asked Harcourt eagerly, ‘What will happen then?’ His host replied with inimitably Victorian complacency: ‘My dear Winston, the experiences of a long life have convinced me that nothing ever happens.’ Sepia-tinted photographs exercise a fascination for modern generations, enhanced by the serenity which long plate exposures imposed upon their subjects. We cherish images of old Europe during the last years before war: aristocrats attired in coronets and ball gowns, white ties and tails; Balkan peasants in pantaloons and fezzes; haughty, doomed royal family groups.
    Young men with moustaches, smoking pipes, clad in the inevitable straw hats, poling punts occupied by reclining girls with bobbed hair and high collars, suggest an idyll before the storm. In polite circles even language was tightly corseted: the words ‘damn’ and ‘bloody’ were impermissible, and more extreme epithets were unusual between men and women save in the most intimate circumstances. ‘Decent’ was an adjective of high praise, ‘rotter’ a noun of profound condemnation. Fifty years later British writer and war veteran Reginald Pound asserted: ‘The sardonic objectivity of our latter-day school of historians can neither penetrate nor dissipate the golden haze of that singular time. For all its rampant injustices, its soaring unearned incomes, its abounding wretchedness, its drunkenness galore, the people knew a kind of untainted happiness that has since gone from the world.’
    Yet even though Pound was there and we were not, it is hard to accept his view. Only a man or woman who chose to be blind to theextraordinary happenings in the world could suppose the early years of the twentieth century an era of tranquillity, still less contentment. Rather, they hosted a ferment of passions and frustrations, scientific and industrial novelties, irreconcilable political ambitions, which caused many of the era’s principals to recognise that the old order could not hold. To be sure, dukes were still attended by footmen wearing white hair-powder; smart households were accustomed to eat dinners of ten or twelve courses; on the continent duelling was not quite extinct. But it was plain that these things were coming to an end, that the future would be arbitrated by the will of the masses or those skilled in manipulating it, not by the whims of the traditional ruling caste, even if those who held power strove to postpone the deluge.
    It is a conceit of our own times to suppose that we are obliged to live, and national leaderships to make decisions, amid