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July 1914: Countdown to War. By Sean McMeekin. Icon, 560pp, Pounds 25.00. ISBN 9781848315938. Published 4 July 2013
Historians and journalists are engaged in a countdown to war, which, almost 100 years later, parallels that of the summer of 1914 - even if this time it is publishing, rather than mobilisation, timetables that impel the ticking-off of the dates on the calendar. Rightly so, for, if we shall spend the next four years working our way through the bloody battles of the Marne, Ypres, the Somme and Gallipoli on to the Allied victory in 1918, the great question is why, after decades of peace, European civilisation self-destructed, plunging its states into fratricidal conflict.
Few people in Britain were concerned that the assassination of an Austrian archduke whom most people had never heard of, in a Balkan town they had to reach for an atlas to correctly place on the map, could lead to a general European war. Still less was it imaginable that Britain would be involved. Indeed, for most of July, in most of Europe, there was little...