A Mad Catastrophe
Geoffrey Wawro
An excellent account of the opening phase of the First World War, focusing on the moribund Austro-Hungarian Empire. The Empire was the real sick man of Europe in 1914, and when war came it quickly experienced a total moral and material collapse (the two were intertwined, as morale tends to sink when you have no ammunition, clothes, or food). One wonders, however, what options there were. In today’s parlance we would speak of the Empire facing an “existential crisis,” especially facing a rising power in Serbia that was determined to stir the Balkan pot. That said, the response was short-sighted as well as vicious. As her last foreign minister put it: “we were bound to die; we were at liberty to choose the manner of our death and we chose the most terrible.” Giving up power is something few people do willingly. The death of an old regime is almost always messy. This was yet another example of that general historical rule.
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