HAMBURG, 24 July 2004 — There was little thought of war in the early summer of 1914, even though the heir to the Austrian throne, Franz Ferdinand, had been assassinated in June and the July Crisis, a frenzy of diplomacy across Europe, ensued.

Nevertheless no one was particularly alarmed. Kaiser Wilhelm II queried whether he should “call an end to the regatta” after the assassination, but the German general staff went off on holiday. Wilhelm remained at Kiel to continue his sailing, making a trip to Norway.

But by the beginning of August the nations of Europe had “slithered over the brink into the boiling cauldron of war”, as the later British Prime Minister David Lloyd George put it.

Everyone was to blame, according to Helmut Grieser, a German historian specializing in the period. Vienna aimed at a regional conflict to bring Serbia into line, but this relatively modest objective was overtaken by more far-reaching aims in other capitals. Berlin, Moscow and Paris wanted to settle the question of the balance of power in Europe.

However, no one wanted a global war. “Effectively the war was an accident of history,” Grieser believes.

Hans-Ulrich Wehler, another German historian, is disinclined to go so far, but acknowledges that “certainly no one wanted this total war, with its trench warfare and the revolutions it led to”.

Nevertheless there was a kind of war euphoria in Germany, France and Britain at the beginning of August, as troops marching through the streets of their cities and towns were given a rousing send-off, kissed by the girls and given flowers. Many never returned.

Initial success went to Germany, its armies drilled in the Prussian tradition making rapid progress through Belgium and France. Gen. Erich Ludendorff took a supposedly impregnable fortress simply by knocking on the door with his ceremonial dagger.

Despite these initial successes, the German forces had little chance of success in the long run, Grieser believes. Too many resources had been put into the Kaiser’s beloved fleet, and the Eastern Front took too many troops, leaving the assault on Paris severely undermanned.

The horror of drawn-out trench warfare ensued, the troops living in appalling conditions of mud, filth, the stench of the dead and disease. They died in their tens of thousands, cut down as they stumbled through the barbed wire guarding the opposing trenches.

Artillery bombardments, although impressive to watch, failed to achieve their objectives, despite the millions of shells expended. And although tanks, aircraft and gas were used for the first time on a large scale, it was the machine gun that set the tone of this war in the mud.

In 1918, the Germans again made considerable progress toward Paris, but the steady flow of fresh troops from the United States told in the end. Germany’s victory in the East, sealed by the October Revolution in Russia in 1917, came too late to save the Kaiser.

Food shortages in the cities of the Central Powers led to uprisings. The monarchies in Germany and Austria went the way of their Russian counterparts, and the Ottoman Empire fell apart too. Conrad von Hoetzendorf, chief of the Austrian general staff, had foreseen this in the fall of 1914.

“I fear this war will prove to be the final nail in the coffin for our monarchy,” he said weeks after war broke out.

The peace talks constituted a failure for the policies of reconciliation advocated by the US. Paris and London wanted revenge — and reparations. Their populations were angry at the devastation and at the death toll. Some 8.5 million people lost their lives.

An array of new states came into being, from Finland, through Poland to Yugoslavia, as well as new Arab states like Syria, Jordan and Iraq. Many were largely artificial, created only to serve the interests of their colonial masters, the French and the British.

The peace treaty signed at Versailles had far-reaching consequences, not the least of which was the rise of National Socialism in a demoralized and severely penalized Germany. “Hitler’s rise would be unimaginable without this situation,” Grieser believes.

And Wehler sees World War II as a direct consequence of the first. “It was planned and prepared because the results of the first war fascinated, depressed and traumatized Germans in equal measure,” he says.

US historian Philip Bobbitt sees the two wars as part of a continuum that begins in 1914 and only ended with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989.

Both the US and the Soviet Union were able to rise from the ashes of World War I, while the Western European powers went into long decline.

Grieser and Wehler see the rise of the US as inevitable, but Wehler regards the German decision to grant Lenin protected passage to St. Petersburg as a vital catalyst in the creation of the second superpower.

“If the Germans had not allowed Lenin to travel from exile in Switzerland to Russia, the threat that the Soviet Union represented would never have come into being,” he says.

The fall of the Soviet Union also saw the break-up of many states created in the aftermath of World War I. Czechoslovakia is no more, nor is Yugoslavia. And the Arab world has never found peace and prosperity.

“There is a terrible continuity in all of this,” Wehler says.