"What happened was not war by accident, but war by ill-conceived Austrian design with German support."
Max Hastings in Catastrophe 1914
There is a view that the royals and statesmen of 1914 stumbled blindly into World War I. Christopher Clark has written a book about the subject entitled Sleepwalkers. My own view is that the men of 1914 were not stumbling into war blindly, but rather, they made the war what it was out of the sum total of their foolish gambles. Austria gambled that German backing would deter Russia from intervening while the Austrians crushed Serbia. The Germans made the same gamble. The Russians gambled that they could put armies in the field before they were organized, trained, and supplied properly because they could count on the French to knock out the Germans from the west. The French made the reverse gamble. All of these gambles crashed and burned.
Hastings echoes my own view about the stakes involved in the defining conflict of the twentieth century. He's a British author who does not share the common view among his British peers that the war was for nothing. He seems to take aim at the Niall Ferguson thesis that Europe would have been better off if the British had sat back and watched the Germans conquer. Hastings writes that even though the Germans may have begun the war without specifically defined goals, they soon made clear how they intended to behave toward the vanquished once victory was achieved.
"The aim of the war is to provide us with security guarantees from east to west for the foreseeable future through the enfeeblement of our adversaries." -Bethmann Hollweg, German chancellor, September 1914. Hastings goes on to provide the itemized list of annexations and reparations the chancellor outlined in his draft on war aims. Much of it involved the disarmament of France, German control of Belgium and Holland, vast areas of Eastern Europe added to Germany, a customs union designed as a vehicle for German dominance of Europe, etc.
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