Jackie Pearcey has twitted Google for not marking, via its Google doodle, the date that Britain entered the Great War*. I am therefore shamed into posting something more relevant than the anniversary below. However, it seems to me that in the grand scheme of things that 4th August is less momentous than the dates which preceded it - and one which came nearly three years later:
June 28th Franz Ferdinand and consort assassinated
July 28th Austria-Hungary declares war on Serbia
August 1st Germany declares war on Russia
August 3rd Germany declares war on France
August 4th Great Britain declares war on Germany
August 12th Great Britain declares war on Austria-Hungary
1917
April United States enters the war
It is presumably this last date which Google will commemorate. As Margaret MacMillan has shown in her current Radio 4 series (I am so glad that it was not named "1914 on a daily basis") not one of the events was inevitable, though the two German war declarations were linked. Also, as the BBC correspondent in Belgium, commenting on this morning's commemoration in Liège, pointed out, if it had not been for the brave Belgian army holding up
for two weeks
the German intended lightning advance, the Kaiser might have succeeded in his plan of knocking out France before she could defend herself and before Britain could come to her aid.
* "World War" probably entered the vocabulary until 1916, and "First World War" seems to have been coined by Fox in the mid-1930s.
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