were if possible more than ordinarily unready. Great Britain particularly was quite unprepared, excepting in her fleet. Not long before her greatest soldier, Lord Roberts, had argued, pleaded, exhorted, for an increase of military strength, to meet the war which in prophetic vision he saw in the not distant future. The only answer that he got was abuse and threats that unless he ceased his alarmist talk he might be deprived of his pension! It was a bitter reflection to the British Government and nation, when the storm broke, that they were unprepared because they had thus scorned his warnings. CHAPTER VIII THE OUTBREAK OF THE WAR The Mysterious Tragedy of Sarajevo - Who Killed the Archduke Ferdinand and His Wife, and Why?—Did the Slavs Conspire to Kill a Man Whom They Loved, or the Germans to Kill One Whom They Hated and Feared? Significant Antecedents, Circumstances and Sequels of the Tragedy — Austria's Demands Upon Serbia - Dictation from Berlin Refusal to Seek a Peaceful Settlement - War Declared on the Basis of a Falsehood-Successive Declarations by Many Governments -International Law Ignored - A Treaty as a "Scrap of Paper" - Proclamations of Neutrality Attitude of the United States. ON JUNE 28, 1914, occurred the tragedy of Sarajevo. The city is the capital of Bosnia, one of the Serbian provinces illegally seized by Austria a few years before the war. Thither on the date named went Archduke Francis Ferdinand, heir presumptive to the Austro-Hungarian thrones, and his morganatic wife, Sophia Chotek, Duchess of Hohenberg. In the morning they drove through the streets, and a bomb was thrown at them, without serious effect. In the afternoon they again drove through the streets, and were killed with pistol shots by Gavrilo Princip, a Bosnian youth, an Austrian subject, said by Austrians to be of Serbian ancestry but by Serbians to be a renegade Jew. Such is the brief record of one of the most mysterious crimes in the world's history, and one with the most tremendous and disastrous sequel. If it was not the cause, it was at any rate the pretext for the war of the nations. As a mystery, it ranks with two other unexplained tragedies in royal and imperial life in the same quarter of the continent, namely, the death of the Austrian heir |