and so it is my pleasure and honor to introduce a master historian Shan mcmein thank you uh well thank you Crosby for that extremely generous introduction and thank you all for showing up on a night that thankfully is not quite as cold as uh I think the last few days have been I'm really overwhelmed by the turnout and by what I've found here so far in Kansas City I visited the war museum earlier today that is the World War I Museum um I was actually a bit surprised when I heard that this was the national World War I Museum when I arrived in Kansas City it's apparently also the only World War I Museum in the entire country which tells you something about the differential perspective in memory of the war here as opposed to in Europe or in a place like turkey I do find museums I think an important access Point into history uh even as I was already something of a budding historian or at the very least a history major for what that's worth uh one of my real Inspirations in coming to grips with the subject actually came when I visited the war museum in Vienna now I'd like to say that this was a very serious highbrow kind of intellectual experience but that was a little bit more like reading a crime novel when I stole the car that France Ferdinand and his wife were traveling in when they were shot and murdered in Saro they also have the uniform which France Ferdinand was wearing when he was shot replete with blood stains although they're no longer red they're rather kind of dry and crusty uh one could be suspicious about such relics there's also the murder weapon the Browning semi-automatic pistol used by the Assassin gillo prip interesting I was in the Saro Museum several years ago and they claim that they have the real murder weapon um it turns out at least according to the proper authorities in Vienna they are wrong um it's interesting though that a museum can be such an inspiration and I like to think that the museum here might do the same thing for some budding young historian here in Kansas City uh one of my other Inspirations for I think again getting to grips with this subject was the very book that I think some of you may already have read or you may be shortly about to read by Barbara tuckman uh The Guns of August it's a gripping read I mean the kind of book that really is it can keep you up all night I mean it should come with one of those warnings you know if you have an important meeting the next day you probably shouldn't start reading it at 10 p.m. now she's that good a Storyteller I have my own quibbles as you're going to see with some of her points of interpretation but what's interesting when you just depose that book by Barbara tuckman with an experience like I had in Vienna there is one rather glaring contrast if you read tuckman's introduction carefully you will see that in order to craft her narrative she actually deliberately left Austria Hungary and Serbia out of the story now this is a little bit like let's say a Hollywood script writer deciding that he needed to cut out some scene or other it's a rather large Omission though if you're trying to understand the origins of the war now in part this functions again in dramatic terms and I think it does help her to tell the story she probably would have had to add about 200 more pages maybe even 500 more pages if she really wanted to get to the bottom of the bulk in Affair um but in retrospect it is a little surprising I think her book like all books was a reflection of the time in the early 1960s when she was writing the book like the late 50s when she was conceiving it was a time obviously of the high Cold War was a time when people were still rather eurocentric in their focus and understanding of politics another Berlin crisis was about to erupt uh the bulans were not really in the headlines nor was Turkey although it did get a little bit of a Philip from the Cuban Missile Crisis right about the time the book came out but that was after she had already written it she wasn't thinking about the bulans and it's clear if you read her narrative which again works brilliantly on its own terms but it's interesting that historians don't really see the war in quite the same way now as they did in tuckman's day I think a large part of the reason for this um well there are two key events one being the wars in the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s which again brought the bulans particularly the former formerly utan or formerly Turkish regions of Southeastern Europe back into the headlines in a rather dramatic way I mean I remember watching the Saro Olympics when I was just about 10 years old and then another decade after that I saw scenes of Bloodshed and Mayhem and SVA which were quite shocking then of course we had 9/11 now among other things 9/11 showed us that a single event and more to the point a single act of terrorism could actually alter human events rather dramatically so suddenly the assassination in Saro doesn't look quite so periferal it doesn't look like just some random happen stats pretext which is the way it kind of more or less appears in Barbara tuckman's book along with most of the work which was coming out back in the 1960s and70s uh most of that work also tended to point the blame at Germany as the primary aggressor um not a lot of people know this but the German war guilt thesis which was actually a matter of statecraft article 231 of the Versailles Treaty of 199 assigned war guilt to the Germans this was essentially the legal basis on which Germany was supposed to pay those reparations the very reparations which incited and enraged Hitler and the Nazis in Germany really the biggest part of their entire program was of course to tear up the Versa treaty the very reparations that and this is the part not many people know about Germany was still paying until 2010 last payment was actually made just over 3 years ago so the legacy of the war lived on in Europe it also lived on of course in the near East the part of the world I've been living since about 2002 where it's also remembered a little bit differently right about the time I arrived in Turkey uh right after I arrived in Turkey in fact we had the Iraq War of 2003 now interestingly after the war as many people know there were rather serious tensions developing between turkey and the United States before the war interestingly most Turks were actually much more concerned about what the British were up to I heard a lot of them them saying I don't want a single British soldier north of bastra now it's interesting that a lot of the places in Iraq which actually erupted into the headlines during the Iraq War and its aftermath were actually battle sites from the first world war places like Al nyria a lot of the battles of even more recent conflicts interestingly were involved in conflicts related to the first world war and its outbreak the conflict which to some extent led to the first world war in a direct sense was actually fought between Italy and turkey in 1911 rather a classic power grab of the age of Imperialism to some extent it was almost the reductio ad absurdism of imperialism the Italians having coming late to the game hadn't really got any choice morsels yet aside from bits and pieces of erria and they were eyeing Libya Tripoli in particular now it's interesting that in that war the fiercest fighting fighting in which some of the later Young Turk leaders like in ver B later and ver Pasha and also M Mustafa kimal later atat Turk or father of the Turkish Nation this is actually where they cut their teeth in combat occurred in the suburbs of Benghazi they were in fact still wrapped up in rather intense fighting around Benghazi against the Italian occupiers when four Balan Powers together declared war on Turkey this being the first Balan League the Balan League of Serbia Montenegro Greece and Bulgaria who were essentially piggybacking on that conflict to attack the Ottoman Empire in a period of its distress now the reason these events have such profound importance for understanding the first world war is not simply that they preceded it in some kind of chronological sense but because of the problems a few Solutions but really more problems than solutions they threw up now the first of these was that Italy and you can only see little bits and pieces of Italy on this map the Turks discovered when Italy attacked Tripoli they discovered a couple of things you know one they were reminded that they actually had colonies in Africa which they largely forgotten about um it was kind of a Backwater of the Ottoman Empire to some extent they held onto it so that they could hold on to this was kind of a myth everyone was quite fond and they cherished of an EMP Empire on three continents they of course didn't have many forces there at most they had about 10,000 regular soldiers they discovered they had no way to supply them and the reason was of course that the Italians controlled the sea the ionian then later the aian sea you can see right here the doanes islands were seized more or less at will by the Italians during the war you know to this day one of The Oddities of living in Turkey is that if you're anywhere near the aan coast you pick up a lot of Greek radio stations and part of the reason is that turkey doesn't really have any Islands left I mean they had maybe two or three uh the Greeks and the Italians mostly took all of them and now they're mostly in Greek hands and a lot of this had to do with the weakness of Ottoman Naval power a weakness which I think was best encapsuled it was a document I actually found in the Russian archives the Russians Believe It or Not began to get worried about the buildup of Ottoman Naval power in the wake of this war because they began ordering dreadnots these state-of-the-art battleships the first old gun firing battleships in England and they'd be been training their officers in England and they had taken to heart this Old Line about uh Waterloo the Battle of Waterloo being won in the pl fields of eaten and so they were all being taught the importance of team sport but most interestingly for the first time ever Turkish naval officers were going to be expected to learn to swim um so this shows you something I think about the backwardness of the Ottoman Empire its efforts though to catch up rapidly which were set in motion by this war so they discover basically they can't Supply Africa they discover in the first Balan War they can't even Supply their own territories over here in Europe Macedonia traa or thce as we usually call it a city like salonica essentially the capital today is thalon still mostly called salonica at this time interestingly this city uh is Greek today because the Greeks beat the bulgarians to it by 24 hours there was actually a race to salonica now the other thing interesting about salonica as we're focusing in here is that it was the birthplace of Mustafa kimal his mother still lived there he was actually trapped in the suburbs of Benghazi when this war broke out and so he actually lost among other things his hometown it's one of the things that really kind of spurred him on obviously later but it also showed to the Ottomans they kind of finally realized it didn't really make much sense to try to hold on to Libya which they couldn't do but they realized they could not move troops across the ocean and so inevitably a naval race was born of this war aside from the fact that the Ottomans lost a great deal of territory you can see Serbia essentially doubles in size this is also from the second Bulan War they took a lot of land from Bulgaria um essentially the Greeks and the bulgar sorry the Greeks and the serbs teamed up against Bulgaria in the second war and the Turks were able to capitalize on this to regain at least a little bit of territory they made it back to adop uh that was in 1913 uh for the most part though the Turks were wiped off the map of of Europe rily as they called it but the Strategic consequence was severe in addition to the Ottomans now trying to build up their Naval power ordering state-of-the-art dreadnots from Britain the Russians were terrified this is something that I discovered again in the archives the Russians were terrified because helpless against the Italians at sea this is even before the first Balan War back in the summer of 1912 the Ottomans did the only thing they really could you might call it an act of asymmetric Warfare they simply closed the Straits this being what we call in English the dardel part of The Straits as they're referred to kind of collectively we have the bosis you can barely see on the map up here at Istanbul Constantinople Russia's only warm water egress to the Mediterranean by way of the bosis the Sea of marmura the D and then the aanc when the Ottomans closed down the Dells Russia's economy went into a tail spin because Russia was no longer able to export the vast grain which was being produced in southern Russia the Black Earth regions they could no longer import the industrial components they needed for their rapidly industrializing economy particularly in Ukraine it was a serious act almost AK into an act of War so the Russians in addition to themselves now they were also by treaty not allowed to import dreadnots through the Straits according to the latest version of what were referred to as Straits conventions the Ottomans were allowed to because they actually own the waters and so Russia began a crash building program in the Black Sea the dreadn race that is of 19134 was not about Britain and Germany in fact interestingly uh the British had outb built the Germans and the Germans had more or less given up by about 1911 the real dreadn race was actually here in the Eastern Mediterranean in the Black Sea and the Clock Was ticking I discovered because the first ottoman dreadn the sultan Osan 1 was scheduled to arrive in ottoman territorial Waters in July of 1914 so it's interesting about the world we might call it the preo world a little bit like people referred to the 910 world that is before 911 when as I actually remember this because I was I was in the US then everyone was talking about shark attacks in Florida and there was some Scandal involving a little leag pitcher you know who had falsified his age documents or something and he was much bigger than the other kids the world of June 27th now in some of the books in the first world war there's a real sharp before and after effect you know a little bit like those weight loss ads right you know you have you have this peaceful world you know of Europe at peace passport travel no one padding you down at the airport in fact there weren't airports of course for the most part an idilic World obviously if you had money and means to travel was probably servants carrying your bags and so on well yes some of this is true um governments were much smaller they didn't surveil the populations we didn't have the NSA reading our emails it was a very different world this doesn't mean that it was a peaceful Idol however in fact what everyone was expecting on the eve of Sara was this there had just been a first Balan war and a second Balan War War everyone was expecting a third Balan war and here is where they were actually expecting it to break out more or less right around here uh in the course of the two Balan Wars huge waves of refugees were going back and forth Muslims and Christians mostly Muslims fleeing Christian areas in rumay or ottoman Europe Christians fleeing the Ottoman Empire in the other direction many of the Muslims were settling into areas here in Western turkey many of them inhabited by Christians tensions were Rising incidents were happening almost daily being reported in the press and in fact the government in Athens issued an ultimatum of sorts to the government of Istanbul this was on the 12th of June 1914 essentially saying that the persecution of Greek subjects in Asia Minor must stop or else dot dot dot so what was actually expected was a war a third Balan War pitting Greece against turkey turkey a war which however would have involved none of the great Powers directly and where many of the Great Powers might have had motivation to stop it now interestingly the Russians already had contingency plans to land troops here partly as they would have like to put it to secure the property and interests of Christian Nationals in the capital but of course they already referred to Istanbul Constantinople as tarad they saw it as essentially Russian Sovereign territory and so this was all the a Prelude to an occupation the Russians were talking about doing this they're War gaming it they're planning it on the other hand they're not sure if they're going to have the support of their allies for this in addition to this we have the fact that if a war breaks out between Greece and Turkey the Turks might well close the straights again which would have been a disaster for Russia so on the one hand the Russians might have liked to seize the opportunity on the other hand because they probably could not have they may also have wanted to dowe the Flames of War which could have done Done Yet more damage to their economic and strategic interests none of the other powers had any particular dog in this fight in fact interestingly contrary to the view which one might get from another book that I wrote about the Kaiser and the Turks it is true the Kaiser did have a close relation with the Turkish Sultan however he was no longer on the throne that being Abdul Hamid the Kaiser's sister was also queen of Greece and in fact Greece was ordering its own dreadnots from Germany so we could get still more confused about the Diplomatic machinations the upshot of all this being that a third Balkan War need not have led to a general configration it might instead have led to something quite different something like a Revival of the concert of Europe another conference in London such as had been held in 1913 to adjudicate the first Bulan war in which none of the great Powers would have had a direct interest in exacerbating expanding or spreading the conflict that's not of course how history turned out instead what we got was this ah so here we are in Seva 28th of June 1914 day some of you may or may not remember as the date of the Stonewall riots um it was also the date more to the point for this story the date where a battle had taken place in 1389 right so we're on the 525th anniversary of the battle the battle of Blackbird field Kosovo po Kosovo another name place of course from recent news headlines now in this battle interestingly Serbia had lost and had essentially been wiped from the map however a young Serb named Milos obich had in the course of losing the battle assassinated the ottoman Sultan Murat and so the day was actually referred to as St VD or vdof Dan oddly it had turned into a day it's a bit hard to describe it either as a day of Celebration or Mourning it was both things at once it was a day to mourn the fall of the great Serbian nation and also to celebrate the First Act of national resistance which was of course an assassination assassination being something like a cult in the servey of 1914 the king and queen had been assassinated in 193 in the Royal Palace along with several government ministers several years previous previously a young Bosnian Serb terrorist and tried to assassinate the austr Hungarian military Governor the austrians had just anex bosnan herzo in 198 interestingly he had failed he had fired off four shots and missed after which apparently the military Governor sort of laughed at him kicked the pistol against the wall and then put him in some kind of like an arm loock now this assassin unsuccessful as he had been had then perished at his own hand and committed suicide that was the other part of the cult assassination then suicide uh the would be assassins with the black hand were all furnished with vials of cyanide of potassium and they were supposed to kill themselves after committing the Glorious act it's interesting that gella prip the man who later fired the Fatal bullet actually went to the grave site of jerish this previous unsuccessful assassin the night before and he actually laid flowers on the tomb so assassination I'm not going to call it a sport because I think that would actually be slightly inaccurate but it was something like a national cult in Serbia it was such a national cult that in fact at the very time the arch duuk France Ferdinand was paying his State visit to Saro preparations were already underway and the first guests had already started arriving for the great reenactment of the assassination of the Ottoman Sultan out on the field of Blackbird field the ottoman Sultan who in recent years had begun to acquire a kind of of hapsburg austr Hungarian dress so they were actually reenacting the assassination of 1389 when the assassination of the 28th of June 1914 happened again if you came to Hollywood with it with this idea you know for a script I think they would tear it up and tell you that's that's far too perfect that's simply ridiculous no one would believe such a thing but it happened now interestingly there were actually seven assassins on the K it's a bit confusing if you see nine Nam but that's because several of them actually changed positions now the reason they changed positions was because the assassination attempt actually failed first couple of guys interestingly the very first assassin in line was a Muslim who had been chosen as window dressing um essentially to throw investigators off the scent of the crime he did nothing he didn't lift a finger he had been recruited locally the only three assassins who were really serious the ones who had been trained back in Belgrade by the the black hand were chabino number three prip number five and grabes number six it was number three cabrinovic who acted he tore off the fuse lighted a fuse bomb and threw it at the Archduke and his car and it actually hit France Ferdinand in the cheek it actually grazed off of his cheek wounded him lightly wounded his wife Sophie as well before detonating under the staff car behind and a number of bystanders along with the autant of the military Governor Lieutenant Colonel morit who had an Italian name interestingly enough was injured ah then everyone dusted themselves off and thank goodness that was over we dodged a bullet now interestingly they then went down to town hall where the mayor who was also a Muslim interestingly um you know introduced the arch duuk the heir to the throne who is incidentally not simply the heir to a ceremonial monarchy but of course this is still more or less an absolute monarchy and in fact he is already running the military to some extent there's a little bit of tension between the two palaces the hoffberg and the beler he's a very important man and in fact the actual Emperor is an octogenarian who is expected to die any day because of ill health so he's a serious man it's a little bit like what the British might call a shadow government this is not simply a ceremonial Aristocrat this is essentially the future ruler of Austria Hungary well so he's introduced and the mayor reads often prepared compliments and so on uh you know he says well we all welcome you here to this city where as you can see our beloved citizens are so pleased that you were and he finally just interrupts him he say are you joking you know they just they threw a bomb at me well anyway so they gather and they discuss what to do next and what's so interesting about this is that they could have done three or four different things one of the options oddly enough was to cut the program short and go over here for lunch as you can see I triy to illustrate this on the map they were going to pass by the mosque meaning the Muslim neighborhoods which they saw is much safer than the Serbian ones but the arch Duke nixed that plan on the other hand he didn't like the other plan either which was go to the museum he decided he actually wanted to go and visit the wounded military officer in the hospital now that was pretty close to the museum which was actually significant because although they changed the planned route now they wanted to just stick along the main road here and run all the cars at high speed like in one of those Hollywood movies where the presidential motorcade so they'd be invulnerable to a shooter they did decide to do that however apparently nobody told the driver of the first car in the motor Gade and so when they got down here and they should have been basically just you know inching into fourth gear and hitting the gas instead he hit the brakes and he turned right second car turned right the third car carrying the arch Duke his wife Sophie along with the military Governor pic turned right as well now pic knew about the new route and he knew they had screwed up and so he scolded the driver and told him to stop and turn around and he stopped and he tried to turn around and couldn't quite get the reverse gear into motion and the car stood there for about two or 3 seconds and those two or three seconds altered the course of world history Gilla Prince ship stepped into Point Blank Range which is actually necessary because he was not exactly a marine sniper this man he had washed out of military training he had maybe about a week of pistol practice he fired the two fatal sh thoughts and it is actually true again if you sold this to a to a Hollywood producer they wouldn't believe you but it is actually true that as France Ferdinand and his wife were bleeding to death in each other's arms he actually did repeat again and again each time more softly than the last it is nothing as his sneaks he's trying to comfort his wife well so what happened next well most of us know the bare outlines of the story we know if you're looking at Europe here that's a map of eastern Europe we know about some of the military plans you know again if you read the traditional version of the story well Germans had a pretext now for the great schen plan to invade France reach Paris by day 42 or thereabouts and then wheel their armies around and defeat Russia this is why they sent the blank check so-call to the austrians excuse me the actual story is of course considerably more complex than that uh the actual story had a lot more to do with Austria Hungary and the Balkans uh particularly of course if you're looking at the dilemas of the austr hungarians they're worried obviously about the serbs who have just won two Wars they do want a war with Serbia fact there's no great mystery about this chief of the austr Hungarian general staff Conrad V Huds andorf um it is said I'm not sure if the count is quite accurate to the level of 100% it said that he advocated going to war with Serbia 25 times in the year 1913 Alone um he had never apparently heard a shot fired in anger and so we cannot necessarily say that he knew whereof he spoke when he spoke of War it is clear however that he advocated a war with Serbia and now suddenly nearly everyone in Vienna agreed with him there was one man however who didn't it's a complicated story I don't have time to go into great detail I'll sum this up by saying that he was a Hungarian now Hungary was now the dual power of what was called the dual monarchy effectively the min president of Hungary man called istan Tia or Stefan Tia had something like excuse me a veto over the policy of the foreign Ministry over Vienna and he in fact did not want to go to war not because he liked serbs but rather because he hated them even more than everyone else as he put it now essentially we already have enough serbs and we don't want more of them uh Hungary in fact was patched together and the hungarians didn't even have they just barely had a majority and even that was a little bit questionable depending on the way they conducted the census now he was also worried about the Russians this was obviously concerned what would the Russians do Hungary simply because of the map of Europe would have been to some extent first in line not just for the Russian invasion but also in case the Romanians invaded um so Hungary had legitimate cause for concern to the extent the austr hungarians shared this concern however they seemed to think the Germans would handle it the Germans had actually handled Russia before previous crises essentially all that had been necessary was a threat back in 199 19899 Europe had nearly plunged into war the Germans simply scared off the Russians with an implied threat of intervention I think and again this is the kind of thing historians argue about the austrians wanted a war with Serbia that's absolutely clear they did not want a war with Russia that is even more clear they knew it was possible however they were were hoping that again the Germans would sort of handle things and the more we look into this the more we realize there was very little close coordination between Berlin and Vienna there was however extremely close coordination between Paris and St Petersburg and this is the really surprising part of the story the part that I've been able to discover some of it comes from Russian sources some from French an interesting problem emerges however when you look at the sources a lot of them aren't there now it has often been said that many of the German papers particularly private correspondents disappeared or was burned and that's partly true and partly not true some of the private corresponden has disappeared some exists interestingly however the official record that is to say the actual government papers in both Berlin and Vienna is virtually unbroken you can see pretty much everything you can even see the Kaiser's temper tantrums he would actually scribble his comments on documents and they were later actually typ lied up by German archists they even tell you exactly when he made the Outburst I mean it's really quite extraordinary when you read this on the Franco Russian side of the July crisis there's virtually nothing like this the there's a huge gap there's a gap of nearly a month simply in the correspondence between the Russian ambassador to Paris a man who this is Alexander isoli who had been humiliated by the austrians back in 198 in what was called the first Bosnian crisis this is when they had the next Bosnia herzo in a home of sevo in the first place he had been so humiliated he been forced to resign as foreign minister he had later then been given the consolation prize of the Paris Embassy from which post he plotted his revenge it was said that when he finally learned of Russian mobilization in 1914 a little bit like kof with the shoe on the table he actually pounded the desk and said this is my war and yet his letters disappear for 4 weeks now it's interesting I'm not sure exactly what was being hid when these documents were destroyed I did discover however several things about the Russian mobilization which is much less welln than the concurrent plans obviously of the Germans here but if we skip to the last graphic we can see the Russian mobilization now first of all you'll notice something it's a bit obscured by the fact that the eighth Army moved from here to hear in this map but the fact is the Germans only had one Army in East Prussia they had bits and pieces but nearly all of seven and nearly eight armies facing France the war actually made a lot of sense from Russia's perspective everyone knew they didn't know the full outlines of the German mobilization plan but everyone knew the Germans were going to move against France the Russians had a golden opportunity It could only be exploited however if they mobilized early Russia being a rather large country with immense distances and a rather primitive rail network now I discover the Russians actually did begin to mobilize early first it was pre-mobilization measures back around the 24th of July immediately following the dispatch of the ultimatum from Vienna to Belgrade to Serbia but before the serbians had actually replied to the ultimatum uh this mobilization took on a much more serious air on the 26th of July with the Advent of the so-called period Preparatory to war it then was made semiofficial as a so-called partial mobilization on the 28th of July before on the night of the 29th of July 1914 not a date many people remember because usually they're thinking about the dates of official War declarations and so on the SAR actually ordered General mobilization of the Russian armies this is before the Germans had even begun pre-mobilization which does not absolve the Germans of responsibility for their role in exacerbating the crisis and obviously urging on the austr however it's quite interesting the first thing that is interesting is that it happened so early the second thing that is interesting is that the tar changed his mind about an hour after he issued the faithful order in fact the officers who were actually transmitting these orders to the telegraph office were called to the phone with an urgent message that the tar had changed his mind as he actually put it at the time quote I do not want to be responsible for a monstrous Slaughter it's a very interesting line because it points out that despite his for lack of a better word Simplicity he was he was not a man of great sophistication SAR Nicholas II he seemed to know exactly what he was doing when he did it the reason he changed his mind incidentally is because he received a telegram from the German Kaiser villy writing to Nikki as they like to call it they actually wrote each other in English which was their common language for buting historians out there amazingly you can find much of this correspondence online so you can follow the sequence what's interesting about the sequence though is that the tar thought the Kaiser was responding to a telegram he said just about an hour previously talking about mediation the hay conference or something like that in fact he was responding to one that had been sent off 24 hours previously with no particular urgency so the tar actually got it wrong but it's interesting that his response when he thought the Kaiser wanted to mediate was to call off the dogs of war there's another incident which interestingly happens the very same night involving the British foreign secretary sir Edward gray and the German Chancellor bman holag now I'm going to mention this only because again the usual interpretation is that well you have these mobilization plans and alliances and the whole war was set in stone and SVA was simply a pretext and the actions and decision making didn't really matter it was all set up by the mobilization plans Well here here's what's interesting the Germans had already realized the seriousness of the situation because they're picking up obviously the news of Russia's ongoing mobilization measures they don't know about General mobilization yet they're already now worried then that Britain is going to intervene even though Britain doesn't have a formal Treaty of Alliance they have informal agreements with both France and Russia and so the German Chancellor two things happened in Rapid sequence the first he actually called in the British Ambassador and went through something like an almost a like a diplomatic Stripes of sorts it was really quite embarrassing he wanted the British to promise neutrality we will not fight and so he was willing to Dole out inside information in order to get this promise so he inadvertently confessed among other things that the German war plan included a March through Belgium simply because he didn't know enough to keep his mouth shut what's interesting about this is just minutes after the British Ambassador had left him in a bit of shock that the German Chancellor had been quite so stupid I mean quite literally when they read this the comment of the British prime minister aswith was my word this something childlike about German diplomacy thing to remember about the Germans in the 20th century very good at War very bad at diplomacy so the Germans that has made a huge blunder a huge mistake now what's interesting is they would not have made this mistake that is alerting Britain to their intentions which gave ammunition to the war party in the British cabinet which did not by any means have a majority in fact they were a small minority in the British cabinet this would not have happened had sir Edward gray made up his mind even five hours three four five hours earlier that he was going to issue a warning to Germany interestingly the Ambassador the British ambassador to Russia who had a front row seat for this drama had warned the British foreign secretary sir Edward gray days earlier that he needed to make clear what Britain's stance was if you let the Germans know Britain will go along with France and Russia against you they may call a halt to Austria's move against Serbia they might he said but you have to be clear you have to be firm well sir Edward gray was many things clear and firm were definitely not among them um he was not decisive um he was not particularly courageous he mumbled so he had not issued any kind of warning until the 29th of July this very day that I've just been telling you about where the SAR orders General mobilization and then changes his mind now interestingly his message again it was slightly elliptical in the gray manner I'll try to get the exact phrasing uh sir Edward gray said that if it came to war in Europe we in London may be forced to take rapid decisions in this case it would not do to stand aside and wait I don't know if that's exactly saying that Britain is going to fight but it's about as close as is ever going to come now what's interesting about this is the German Chancellor when he read this message just minutes after his diplomatic Stripes Act of confessing the darkest secrets of the J German mobilization plan he actually sent off a wire to Vienna that night and here's what he said he instructed his Ambassador that the austrians must begin immediate negotiations and they must accept outside mediation with Serbia over the terms of the ultimatum he said and I quote we must decline to let ourselves be dragged by Vienna one tonely and without regard to Our advice into a world congration he rescinded the blank check probably about 12 hours too late because earlier that day Austria Hungary had begun shelling Belgrade um now Belgrade had essentially been declared an open City by the serbs it was not even really being defended and these shells did very little damage and in fact the austrians were not going to be ready to declare war that is to actually fight the war for another two weeks um in fact the Germans when they finally learned that Austria Hungary had declared war by telegram against Serbia were a bit shocked because they had just been told that the austrians were going to wait until August 12th when the Army was actually going to be ready to fight Serbia now what's interesting about this again to spin the wheel back just a little bit and talk about alternative outcomes even setting aside the business between sir Edward gray and the German Chancellor the austr Hungarian foreign minister baral had himself decided essentially with virtually no input from anyone else to declare war on Serbia on the 28th of July even though the Army was not going to be ready to fight Serbia for another two weeks he kind of got his carrots and sticks backwards um the reason he did is kind of interesting the way I have actually interpreted this based on the documents is that he didn't want to answer his phone anymore because everyone was calling in with these kind of Peace mediation plans one after another trying to get the austrians to stand down he had finally gotten the austr Hungarian government behind this war policy and he just didn't want to hear it and so he declared war by telegram when the Serbian prime minister received the telegram he actually sent off an urgent query to Paris Petersburg in London telling them he had gotten this really strange Telegram and it didn't make any sense and was it actually true that austr Hungary was so stupid as to declare war already a lot of history it turns out is actually like it like this a lot of history is not only contingent but depends I think on a complicated interplay between personality and of course character in some cases it's weakness the weakness of someone like sir Edward gray not actually trying to State a policy or even get a cabinet behind it but just delaying and Heming and hawing until it's too late to affect the outcome in some cases like barold know it's a combination of I suppose impatience and a certain cowardice um in the case of the Germans in the month of July 1914 the word I would actually use is incompetence although that actually applies to the austrians as well now with the Russians and French it's a little bit more complicated I some people have read my book and they've said that look I'm trying to indict France and Russia being the primary instigators of the war this is this partly Publishers pabulum you know they have to sell the book with the jacket copy and so on well there's a bit of that sure I I am trying to put more emphasis on the role of France and Russia and particularly the blank check essentially that France sends to Russia that is that they assure the Russians of their support for Russia's early mobilization I think what was really going on on that side though was was a little bit more connivance and very successful diplomacy because what was really at stake aside from who mobilized first and how the early battles might go what was really at stake of course for the diplomats and the Statesmen was how they would be perceived by history they were already thinking about posterity and that's why they began arranging the documents and purging the documents that's why to give you one example among many when the French ambassador to Petersburg reported the news of Russia's final General mobilization to Paris it took about 30 hours for the message to reach Paris because he wanted plausible deniability so they could keep denying that Russia had in fact mobilized because they in addition to looking at posterity were looking at Great Britain and How Great Britain would interpret the crisis and possibly later on how maybe even the United States might have interpreted the crisis and how later diplomats and historians would judge them because they already knew that the eyes of History were on them so this is the story that I've tried to tell in the book and uh obviously I hope that many of you will read it and I encourage you to con to come to your own conclusions consult the sources and come to your own conclusions and I'd like to open up here for [Applause] questions there is a microphone up front so if you have a question if You' please come up to the microphone if I could get a brief answer I respect your time constraints uh you talk about the personality shaping history uh you did not touch on one dragutin dmitrovich and what did did aince shape him or did he shaped the union of death or the black hand and what role did he have in actually bringing this assassination about that's a very good question dragutin Dimitri or apis as his kind of n went was the head of the black hand also the head of Serbian Military Intelligence um now it has sometimes been asserted straight up that he quote unquote organized the plot that is to say that he was the driving force all along um there's some evidence to suggest this and he actually later did confess his guilt in a court of law although he was actually being charged with crime although he may have been encouraged to do so in part to deflect suspicion from others my own view is that he played an important role and I think he would have probably made the final decision as far as giving a goahead but I think some of the initiative actually actually percolated up from below that is to say some of it came from Prince ship and chabin who came up to some extent I think with the idea by themselves and they later had to find sponsors uh someone to provide them with money weapons and so on um there's a little bit of speculation uh even Beyond apis of some sort of peripheral Russian involvement apus was in regular contact with the Russian military atach Victor artam monov and some of you might have heard the name of Victor sge uh most famous to history as Stalin's super spy in Tokyo you know who alerted Stalin to the movement of the Siberian divisions in 1914 right before the Battle of Moscow in his memoirs he says that he was in Serbian radical circles in the mid1 1920s and he heard discussion of the fact that many of them claimed that artamonov that is the Russian military at had actually greenlighted the operation now this is a very controversial Theory and it's not one that I think there is substantial evidence to prove or disprove uh my own view which is shared by the great Italian journalist historian Luigi albertini who interviewed artamonov is that he knew of the plot um he had plausible deniability of himself he was out of town when it happened um just kind of interesting because the Russian military Ates you might think would have had an interest in the Austrian military Maneuvers which were taking place during the arch Duke's visit that was actually the purpose of his visit um so there's a lot of smoke there even Beyond apis um but so far we haven't really been able to connect the dots it's a very good question I'm wondering how much the defeat of Russia and the Japanese war had to do with any this and if the Russian army learned anything from their defeat well two very good questions yes it did have a lot to do with this partly in the way it affected Russia's own development and partly in the way the austrians and the Germans were I think reading events it was in the wake of the Russo Japanese war that the crisis of 19899 over Bosnia transpired where the Russians were still still weak and recovering from the revolution which had been born of their defeat in the war against Japan bloody sunnday and all the rest so that the Russians seem to be weak and preoccupied with internal concerns I think it's factored into the calculation of the austrians and Germans that is that it was something of a bluff in July 1914 a bluff which Russia obviously called something I think to the surprise of the Germans um now as far as it impacted the Russians it's interesting that uh military attaches and obviously Russian officers who had witnessed the fighting on land against Japan I think did have a much more sanguine view of the capabilities that is of offensive Warfare they had already seen the digging of trenches so they already knew something about this that's not to say though the learning curve in Russia was particularly steep there were still a lot of kind of crusty old officers who believed in things like fortresses and so on and Cavalry you know they haven't really gotten the message yet I think the Russian army was semi- reformed by 1914 the Germans had begun to think that it was the steamroller in the making but in fact of course in the event it was somewhere in between it was it was competent enough to more or less defeat the austr hungarians but obviously inferior to the German army so they had learned something but probably not enough well something that seems to have been lost in this tragedy was the um Turks genocide of the Armenia and how did this factor in um factor into the origins of the war is what you're saying yeah well it did to some extent because there was a crisis in the winter of 1913 1914 um there were two crisis which came together which actually very nearly produced a conflagration I didn't mention the leemon fanders crisis in the talk this is when a German officer was appointed to supervise the Russian Straits defenses I'm sorry the ottoman Straits defenses now this crisis actually came to a head in the winter of 19 193 1914 at the same time as the European ambassadors in Istanbul Constantinople were negotiating terms for something called an Armenian reform agreement um what this was looking at was some kind of supervisory role for the powers in the six Eastern provinces of turkey sometimes called the Armenian provinces although Armenians were not actually majority in any of them they were numerous now what was going on in the background here was Russian pressure uh the Russians were the ones who were behind the Armenian reform campaign and all of this together with the appointment of this German officer produced a pretty serious War scare in January and February of 1914 it also produced something of a complex in the minds of The Young Turks that is about this Nexus between possible Russian intervention and the Armenian provinces of Eastern Turkey uh the Russians in fact were quite active in Eastern Turkey there were even American Christian there were Christian missions that were active in Eastern Turkey which had begun seeking the protection of Russian consules in Eastern Turkey and The Young Turks were already to some extent that is paranoid about some kind of a Russian move there they obviously saw this as a pretext for a Russian invasion that's the way they saw things and whether or not they were you know completely off their rocker or whether they had some kind of a point I think the truth is somewhere in between the Russians did have plans the Russians did have ties to The Armenian revolutionary organizations that's doesn't say they had a master plan absolutely not but the Turks began to think they did um and obviously the consequences in 1915 with the deportations and massacres of huge numbers of Armenians in Eastern Turkey were serious I have a couple of comments first of all I think you're talking about theity of French Russian sources in 1914 July mhm clemon saw was in St Petersburg at the time that the crisis was unfolding so he and Nicholas had verbal conversations and that may have been one of the reasons that there was no written records on those events what transpired what clono and Nicholas do you mean panare pardon you yeah uh we're talking about in 1914 and then they made their way slowly back uh to to France sing off in in Stockholm the second point is I'm not agreed that berold simply decided on war you don't forget the ultimatum that the Austrian Hungarian government sent to Serbia which the Germans were not even fully aware of the text and which was extremely tightly phrased almost unacceptable to the Serbian but the serbians were almost on the verge the way they translated it interpreted it um the war could have been avoided all right two very good questions first about the French in St Petersburg the president pan Kare indeed met with the tar now he met with the tar interestingly right before the ultimatum was dispatched and the old view had been that the ultimatum took everyone a little bit like in cassablanca everyone was shocked shocked by this ultimatum to Serbia in fact they knew it was coming was an Open Secret which had actually been spilled by the Italians the POS of sources though about this Summit there there are a few we have a few diary entries from Lou de roban the French Embassy secretary we also have some of pan kare's own diary entries so we do in fact know that the French had already begun to think seriously that the crisis was going to lead to war the debates on the French side have to do with the Ambassador in fact P was his name um Maurice P actually did Green like the Russian mobilization that is the early mobilization some of the debates around whether or not he had authorization from the president there's no written proof that he did it seems pretty clear though that because he and the president were close and they had huddled together for four whole days during the president's visit that they simply must have agreed on a policy line even if it can't be documented um now about barold and the ultimatum is quite true the Germans were not actually shown the text in fact bar told even lied to the German ambassador that it wasn't finished yet after he had already sent it off to Belgrade um clearly he was a little bit worried about even what the Germans would think about the harshness of the tone although considering the seriousness of the act of terrorism one could very easily make the case of course that the austrians had a Justified complaint and they might have gone too far in some of the terms but they did have a right to demand some sort of redress and Justice now berold had not necessarily decided on war you make a good point he had decided however and they're quite explicit about this this if you actually read you can read the transcripts of the discussions in the ministerial Council on the 19th of August which was actually held in bol's private residence the delightfully named strudel Hoff or um the house of apple strudel I suppose we might call it um it's actually held in bold's house and they were quite explicit about this they were quite explicit about the fact that they wanted the serbs to reject it now Serbia's own response was quite brilliantly calibrated to uh manipulate opinion it was in elegantly crafted although in fact there were scribblings at the very last minute um it was a sort of uh actually Chris Clark has a great line on this he calls it a highly perfumed rejection um the serbs had in fact been instructed by the Russians to reject at least one article strictly and unequivocally and accept all of the others with conditions I'll give you an idea of the tone it'll be something like this um Serbia should make a statement to the effect that um they are apologizing for any possible role in this crime and instead it would read we apologize for being accused by a crime by the austrians I'm paraphrasing but that's basically the gist the earlier version which was more conciliatory was actually sent to Paris Petersburg and London precisely to manipulate opinion the final version was far less conciliatory uh which was of course what the austrians wanted and it's also what the Russians wanted um the the Serbian prime minister incidentally may have himself been in a real pickle or a dilemma because as one of the German observers put it he thought that if pasich that was his name the Serbian prime minister you know had accepted the ultimatum there would have been an immediate military couet led by this apis character that we're talking about to overthrow him so he was in a real bind it's hard to just say well look he should have accepted the ultimatum it obviously would have been very difficult for him to do so um it is clear though that Bol and the austrians wanted a rejection there's no doubt about that first of all I want to thank you again for coming really appreciate it um second of all I I wanted you to to expand on a couple points you made at the beginning of your talk you had mentioned that in light of the '90s Balan War and the events of 911 um the beginning of the war are under new light um and I've been thinking about that a lot uh since 911 um given I understand much of this was coming to a boiling point or a climax anyway and given the uh the treaties that were already in place I understand all that led to you know the eventual World War but I think it's interesting that the black hands Act of terrorism seemed to go almost as part and parcel with everybody's act after that could you kind of expand on how their act of terrorism and the Serbian role in in in that uh now is seen and and could that have played out differently the act of terrorism itself correct well it was clearly not isolated in the sense that there had been a series of similar assassination attempts and outrages and something of an orgy of violence in the Serbian Royal Palace back in 193 so to some extent it was part of a Continuum of of violence in the bulans there were a lot of secret societies The Young Turks themselves incidentally as we call them in English that's not what the Turks call them uh were themselves a similar kind of a conspiracy which actually centered in salonica the city that I've been talking about a lot it was actually the center of all kinds of things that were going on and they were clearly to some extent mimick you know what was being done across the Balkans there were other organizations one of the most famous being the internal Macedonian revolutionary organization um which is a largely although not exclusively Bulgarian Affair um and the imro had actually been involved in in a number of Acts of terrorism in 193 the very same year as this act of terrorism in Serbia although interestingly the uprising uh which led to the Macedonian crisis of 193 was actually launched by another Fringe Group which was not the imro so there were a lot of these groups and if we want to spread the story a little bit east The Armenian revolutionary organizations particularly the dashnaks and the Huns were themselves actually modeled along very similar lines they had a kind of public respectable face in Europe where they would Lobby and go to conferences and so on and they were also in Eastern Turkey paramilitary organizations um which didn't always only target the Turks incidentally at times they would also Target the Russians and oddly enough at times the ottoman government government even teamed up with the Armenian revolutionary organizations and gave them arms and tried to send them into Russia thinking they wanted to make them Russia's problem so there was a lot of this going on in this part of the world now it's again the idea of this kind of peaceful ideal being suddenly interrupted an idea I think most recently and popularly ProMag by David frin in a book called Europe's last summer I don't think that's quite tenable again I think there would have been conflict of some kind I just don't think it would have necessarily involved all the great Powers you know there are other reasons why related to what the french were obsessing about at the time mostly a sex Affair basically U involving among other things the shadow prime minister and the president Shadow prime minister's wife the English being obsessed with Ireland the home rule question there are many ways in which uh the history of 1914 absence area would have turned out differently however I think there still would have been obviously these secret societies acts of violence and you know possibly even provocations leading to crisis possibly some kind of a Russian intervention in Turkey but which might not have had the support of the powers the thing the precise nature of the sequence of events of July 1914 is again that it led to the dominoes falling in just that precise way Austrian move against Serbia bringing in Russia in a way where Russia would have the backing of France and then Britain uh the crisis had to unfold precisely so or I don't think it would have happened ladies and gentlemen appropriately enough Professor mcmein will be signing his book in the Southeast corner of the library in the cafe and I do want to remind the blackand of Blue Valley the friends of Peter Fortune that they are to sign in with his father at the back uh of the hall