In January 1914 few Europeans imagined that, seven months later, their political and military leaders would plunge the world into a cataclysmic war. Public attention in most capitals was elsewhere. Britain was preoccupied with the Irish home rule crisis and other domestic troubles. Le tout Paris was about to engross itself in the Caillaux affair, in which a French politician’s wife shot dead Le Figaro’s editor, stood trial for murder and was acquitted.
According to the memoirs of Vladimir Kokovtsov, Russia’s premier in early 1914, politics in St Petersburg revolved around the personality of Grigory Rasputin, the tsarist court’s hypnotic holy man. Meanwhile, a penniless 24-year-old Austrian painter mooched about Munich, desperate to avoid his native country’s military draft. His name was Adolf Hitler.
Little more than a month after the June 28 assassination in Sarajevo of the archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Habsburg throne, fighting erupted on multiple fronts. By the time the conflict ended in November 1918, the war had resulted in tens of millions of military and civilian casualties.