NINETEENTH CENTURY EUROPE

In the next few pages, the answer to Question B really will be discussed in two separate parts: Who started the war? And, could the wholesale slaughter have been prevented.

For one thing, World War I did not begin because of the assassination of that pompous, dull-witted Franz Ferdinand and his morganatic wife, Sophie. It was only the final match to a gasoline soaked inflammable pile. The British were concerned more with internal; affairs, such as Ulster. The French, having been treated to the opening of anti-Semitic wounds in their military by the trial of Capt. Alfred Dreyfus and his defense by Emile Zola, were more interested in "the sensational case of Madame Caillaux, wife of the finance minister and head of the Radical Party, who had murdered the editor of Le Figaro (Joll, 1984, p. 172).

Equally, the working class was uninterested, and disinterested in any sort of war. Their movement emphasized that "Wars are inherent in the nature of capitalism; they will only cease when the capitalist economy is

. . .
ermany had the military superiority- perhaps not in total manpower, but certainly in military s6traty. Bismarck was gone, so now there was Hindenburg, among others. They had not wasted time in political maneuvers, but in readying their plans, and building an army, a navy and an incipient air force (remember the famous "Red Baron" Richthofen?) Germany was at the bottom of all the schemes and manipulations merely to become the most powerful. It was national ego, not national pride. Since 1870, there had been no wars. But bitterness dies hard. Yet, "like most transitional periods it was a paradoxical age. In which millions enjoyed unprecedented well-being and other millions lived in more than usually abject poverty" (Taylor, 1963, p. 26). It was this tremendous chasm between the Have's and the Have Not's that brought some nationalistic fervor to some of the subjugated- in Hungary, in most of the Balkans- after all, the assassination in Sarajevo was an act of "nationalism"- Princip would have killed anybody to make his point. Edward VII was one of the few who realized the political problems in the first decade of the Twentieth Century. He took a trip to visit France, the Kings of Italy and Spain, in order to talk them out
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Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 1201
Approximate Pages = 5 (250 words per page)

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