In another week there would be no chance of that confusion as Britain jumps in.
From The Local-Austria:
100 years since Austria declared war on Serbia
Serbian infantry at Ada Ciganjila. Photo: Vojska Ada Ciganlija/Wikimedia
July 28 marks the 100th anniversary of the declaration of war by Austria on its neighbour Serbia. We look back at the start of the crisis that was to shape history.
News-hungry, patriotic crowds had been massing for hours outside newspaper offices in Vienna when emperor Franz Joseph's "To My Peoples!" proclamation of war against Serbia finally came on the evening of July 28, 1914.
A month after a Bosnian Serb revolutionary assassinated Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, in Sarajevo, the uppity Serbs were going to get a long-deserved bloody nose.
Special editions were ripped out of newspaper sellers' hands, and in Vienna at least, nationalistic songs were sung late into the summer night, triumphant speeches were made and thousands thronged the streets.
"Maybe people didn't think it would be over by Christmas, but the feeling was that it would be done by mid-1915," historian and Austrian Military Museum (HGM) director Christian Ortner told AFP.
"But Vienna was playing a game of very high risks."And from the Oxford University Press blog:
Instead of a short war - and one confined to the Balkans as Vienna thought - this was the start of World War I, four years of conflict drawing in all the great powers of the time and killing nine million soldiers.
A day after Austria-Hungary's declaration, Serbia's ally Russia began mobilising. On August 1, Germany declared war on Russia and two days later on France. On August 4, with Germany invading Belgium, Britain declared war on Germany....MORE
The month that changed the world: Tuesday, 28 July 1914
July 1914 was the month that changed the world. On 28 June 1914, Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated, and just five weeks later the Great Powers of Europe were at war. But how did it all happen? Historian Gordon Martel, author of The Month That Changed The World: July 1914, is blogging regularly for us over the next few weeks, giving us a week-by-week and day-by-day account of the events that led up to the First World War.
Kaiser Wilhelm received a copy of the Serbian reply to the Austrian demands in the morning. Reading it over, he concluded that the Habsburg monarchy had achieved its aims and that the few points Serbia objected to could be settled by negotiation. Their submission represented a humiliating capitulation, and with it ‘every cause for war’ collapsed. A diplomatic solution to the crisis was now clearly within sight. Austria-Hungary would emerge triumphant: the Serbian reply represented ‘a great moral success for Vienna’.
In order to assure Austria’s success, to turn the ‘beautiful promises’ of the Serbs into facts, the Kaiser proposed that Belgrade should be taken and held hostage by Austria. ‘The Serbs,’ he pointed out, ‘are Orientals, and therefore liars, fakers and masters of evasion.’ An occupation of Belgrade would guarantee that the Serbs would carry out their promises while satisfying satisfying the honour of the Austro-Hungarian army. On this basis the Kaiser was willing to ‘mediate’ with Austria in order to preserve European peace.
In Vienna that morning the German ambassador was instructed to explain that Germany could not continue to reject every proposal for mediation. To do so was to risk being seen as the instigator of the war and being held responsible by the whole world for the conflagration that would follow. Berchtold began to worry that German support was about to evaporate. He responded by getting the emperor to agree to issue a declaration of war on Serbia just before noon. For the first time in history war was declared by the sending of a telegram....MORE
