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When a Serbian-backed assassin gunned down Archduke Franz Ferdinand in late June 1914, the earth seemed unmoved. Even Ferdinand's own uncle, Franz Josef I, was notably ambivalent about the death of the Hapsburg heir, stating simply, "It is God's will." Certainly, there is nothing to claim that the episode would lead to conflictmuch less a world battle of such significant and horrific proportions that it would fundamentally reshape the course of human occurrences. As acclaimed historian Sean McMeekin shows in July 1914, World Battle I would have been averted entirely possessed it not been for a small group of statesmen who, in the month following the assassination, plotted to use Ferdinand's murder as the trigger for a long-awaited showdown in European countries. The primary culprits, in addition, have long escaped blame. While most accounts of the war's outbreak place the bulk of responsibility on German and Austro-Hungarian militarism, McMeekin draws on unusual new proof from archives across European countries to show that the most detrimental offenders were actually to be found in Russia and France, whose belligerence and duplicity ensured that battle was inevitable. If they plotted for battle or rode the whirlwind nearly blind, each of the men involvedfrom Austrian Foreign Minister Leopold von Berchtold and German Chancellor Bethmann Hollweg to Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Sazonov and French president Raymond Poincarsought to capitalize on the fallout from Ferdinand's murder, unwittingly leading European countries toward the best cataclysm it possessed ever before seen. A groundbreaking account of the genesis of World Battle I, July 1914 says the gripping tale of Europe's countdown to battle from the bloody starting work on June 28th to Britain's last plunge on August 4th, demonstrating how a single monthand a small number of menchanged the course of the twentieth century.
