Chapter 2 · 1914 · David Partridge · Bridport, March 2026
On 28 June 1914, Gavrilo Princip shot Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo. By the time the killing stopped, a quarter of Serbia's population was dead. Around 1.2 million people out of 4.5 million. Serbia — the country where it happened, the country that was supposed to be on the right side. A quarter of its people, gone, because a nineteen-year-old fired a pistol on a street corner.
That's the first thing to understand. The disproportion. One man killed, and the world responded by killing seventeen million more.
The second thing to understand is that if it hadn't been Sarajevo, it would have been something else. You can always find another archduke. The system was primed. The alliances were locked in. The arms race had been running for a decade. The railway mobilisation timetables had been drawn up so precisely that once one country started moving troops, everyone else had to move theirs or be caught unprepared. The assassination wasn't the cause of the war. It was the starting pistol that a dozen governments were waiting for.
But here's the question that doesn't get asked enough: what was Britain doing there?
Nobody was threatening to invade us. Germany had been building a navy, and that made the Admiralty nervous, but nervous isn't the same as under attack. The German war plan — the Schlieffen Plan — was about fighting France and Russia. Britain was an afterthought. We weren't in danger. Our homes weren't at risk. Our people weren't at risk.
What was at risk was our position. Our empire. Our status as the dominant naval power. Our assumption that European affairs should arrange themselves in ways that suited us. We had sat out the Franco-Prussian War in 1870 without any difficulty at all. France and Prussia fought, Prussia won, Germany was unified, and Britain watched from the sidelines and carried on trading. The world didn't end. The empire didn't fall. We simply chose not to get involved, and nothing terrible happened to us as a result.
So what changed between 1870 and 1914? Not the threat to the British Isles — there wasn't one in either case. What changed was that Germany had grown powerful enough to challenge British primacy, and the British establishment couldn't tolerate that. The war was about who got to run the world, dressed up as a war about poor little Belgium.
Belgium was the formal reason. Britain had guaranteed Belgian neutrality under the Treaty of London in 1839. When Germany invaded Belgium as part of the Schlieffen Plan, Britain had its casus belli. But a treaty obligation to protect Belgian neutrality didn't require four years in the trenches. It didn't require the Somme, where 57,000 British soldiers became casualties on the first day — twenty thousand of them dead before lunch. It didn't require Passchendaele, where men drowned in mud. The treaty said protect Belgium. It didn't say feed a generation into machine guns.
The cabinet was divided. It wasn't inevitable. Liberal ministers resigned over the decision. If the political winds had blown slightly differently, Britain could have stayed out, just as it had in 1870. The war might still have happened — France and Russia against Germany and Austria-Hungary — but it would have been a different war, probably shorter, almost certainly less catastrophic.
Instead, we chose to go in. And then we told ourselves we had no choice.
That's the pattern. That's the thing I want to trace through a century of Western wars. We act, or we choose, or we provoke — and then we say we were dragged into it. It wasn't us. We were the reluctant ones. We were defending freedom, or democracy, or civilisation, or the little countries. Never our own power. Never our own interests. Never our own fear of being overtaken.
And a quarter of Serbia died. The country we were supposedly fighting for. Nobody talks about Serbia. Nobody ever talks about the people who actually pay the price.