playboy who was forced to relinquish his claim to the throne after a 1908 scandal in which he kicked his butler to death. His brother Alexander, who became the royal heir, was suspected of attempting to poison Djordje. The Serb royal family provided no template for peaceful co-existence, and the army wielded as much power as that of a modern African statelet.
Though Serbia was a rural society, it boasted a dynamic economy and a Western-educated intellectual class. One of the latter’s aspiring sophisticates enthused to a foreign visitor: ‘I am so fond of this country. It is so pastoral, don’t you think? I am always reminded of Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony.’ He whistled a few bars abstractedly. ‘No, I made a mistake. That is the Third, isn’t it?’ Centuries of Ottoman dominance had bequeathed an exotic Eastern cultural legacy. American correspondent John Reed wrote:
All sorts of people hung about the stations, men turbaned and fezzed and capped with conical hats of brown fur, men in Turkish trousers, or in long shirts and tights of creamy homespun linen, their leather vests richly worked in colored wheels and flowers, or in suits of heavy brown wool ornamented with patterns of black braid, high red sashes wound round and round their waists, leather sandals sewed to a circular spout on the toe and bound to the calf with leather ribbons wound to the knees; women with the Turkish yashmak and bloomers, or in leather and woollen jackets embroidered in bright colors, waists of the rare silk they weave in the village, embroidered linen underskirts, black aprons worked in flowers, heavy overskirts woven in vivid bars of color and caught up behind, and yellow or white silk kerchiefs on their heads.
In cafés, men drank Turkish coffee and ate kaymak cheese-butter. Every Sunday in village squares peasants gathered to dance – different dances for marriages, christenings, and even for each party at elections. They sang songs that were often political: ‘If you will pay my taxes for me, then I will vote for you!’ This was the nation that was the focus of intense Austrian anxiety and hostility, matched by Russian protectiveness. Whatever view is adopted about Serbia’s role in the crisis of 1914, it is hard to make a case that its people were martyred innocents.
In western Europe, Balkan violence was so familiar that new manifestations aroused only weary disdain. In Paris in June 1914, the general European situation was thought less dangerous than it had been in 1905 and 1911, when acute tensions between the Triple Alliance and the Triple Entente were defused by diplomacy. Raymond Poincaré, fifty-three years old, was a former conservative prime minister who was elected president in 1913, and made his office for the first time executive rather than ceremonial. Though he became the first holder of the post since 1870 to dine at the Germans’ Paris embassy, he loathed and feared the Kaiser’s nation, and caused support for Russia to become the central pillar of French foreign policy. Few responsible historians suggest that the French desired a European war in 1914, but to a remarkable degree Poincaré relinquished his country’s independence of judgement about participating in such an event. The Germans were the historic enemies of his people. Their war plan was known to demand an immediate assault on France, before addressing Russia. Poincaré believed, perhaps not wrongly, that the Entente powers must hang together, or Germany would hang them separately.
France had recovered brilliantly from defeat by Prussia in 1870. Bismarck’s annexation of the twin French provinces of Alsace and Lorraine as a strategic buffer zone west of the Rhine remained a grievance, but was no longer a bleeding wound in the national consciousness. The French Empire was prospering, despite chronic discontent among its Muslim subjects, especially in North Africa. The army’s prestige had been appallingly damaged by its senior officers’ decade-long parade of brutality, snobbery, stupidity and anti-Semitism in the Dreyfus case, but it was now recognised – though not by the Kaiser – as one of the most formidable fighting forces in Europe. France’s surging fortunes and commitment to innovation were symbolised by the first telephone boxes, railway electrification, the birth of Michelin maps. The brothers Lumière pioneered the development of cinema. Transport was being mechanised, with Paris becoming the fourth world city to acquire a metro, soon transporting four hundred million passengers a year. It was acknowledged as the cultural capital of the world, home to the avant-garde and the finest painters on earth.
The Third Republic was known as the ‘république des paysans’; though social inequality persisted, the influence of the landowning class was weaker than in any other European nation. French social welfare was evolving, with a voluntary pensions scheme, accident-insurance law, improved public health. France’s middle class wielded more political power than that of any other European nation: Poincaré was the son of a civil servant, and himself a lawyer; former and future prime minister Georges Clemenceau was a doctor and the son of another. Insofar as the aristocracy played a part in any profession, it was the army, though it is noteworthy that the origins of France’s principal soldiers of 1914–18, Joseph Joffre, Ferdinand Foch and Philippe Pétain, were alike modest. The influence of the Church was fast diminishing among the peasantry and the industrial masses; its residual power rested with the aristocracy and the bourgeoisie. The nation was becoming more socially enlightened: though Article 213 of the Code Napoléon still decreed that a wife owed legal obedience to her husband, a modest but growing number of women entered the legal or medical professions, foremost among them Marie Curie, who won two Nobel Prizes.
Rural conditions remained primitive, with peasants living in close proximity to their animals. Foreigners sneered that French standards of hygiene were low: most people had only one bath a week, and humbler middle-class men kept up appearances with false collars and cuffs. The French were more tolerant of brothels than any other nation in Europe, though there was some dispute about whether this reflected enlightenment or depravity. Alcoholism was a serious problem, worsened by rising prosperity: the average Frenchman consumed 162 litres of wine a year; some miners assuaged the harshness of their labours by drinking up to six litres a day. The country had half a million bars – one for every eighty-two people. Mothers were known to put wine in their babies’ bottles, and doctors frequently prescribed it for illness, even in children. Alcohol and masculinity were deemed inseparable. To drink beer or water was unpatriotic.
French politicians were obsessed with the need to counter Germany’s demographic advantage. Between 1890 and 1896, the years when many of those who would fight the First World War were born, Kaiser Wilhelm’s people produced more than twice as many children as the Republic; the 1907 census showed France’s population at just thirty-nine million, meaning that there were three Germans for every two Frenchmen. French working mothers received paid maternity leave, with a cash bonus to those who breast-fed. Health standards had risen impressively since the beginning of the twentieth century, when one in ten new French military recruits stood less than five feet one inch tall, but many bourgeois families chose to defy their priests and restrict themselves to one child. Poincaré presented his 1913 three-year compulsory military service law as an essential defensive measure. By heroic endeavours, France had restored itself to the status of a great power. But almost no one, including its own people, supposed its unaided military strength the equal of Germany’s – which was why it had sought the alliance with Russia.
The British, last-comer to create a third pillar of the Entente, ruled the largest empire the world had ever seen, and remained its foremost financial power, but discerning contemporaries understood that their dominance was waning. At home, vast new wealth was being generated, but social and political divisions had become acute. Britain’s five million most prosperous inhabitants shared an annual income of £830 million, while the remaining thirty-eight millions made do with the balance, £880 million. The journalist George Dangerfield looked back at Britain’s condition in the Edwardian and post-Edwardian era from the perspective of 1935 in his milestone work The Strange Death of Liberal England:
The new financier, the new plutocrat, had little of that sense of responsibility which once had sanctioned the power of England’s landed classes. He was a purely international figure, or so it seemed, and money was his language … Where did the money come from? Nobody seemed to care. It was there to be spent, and to be spent in the most ostentatious manner possible; for its new masters set the fashion … Society in the last pre-war years
