The Coming of the War, 1914

Bernadotte Schmitt's two volume The Coming of the War, 1914 reconstructs the diplomatic crisis that turned the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo into a general European war within five weeks, tracing the ultimatums, mobilizations, and alliance obligations that pulled Austria Hungary, Germany, Russia, France, and Britain into the conflict one after another during July and early August 1914. Schmitt built the book from the diplomatic documents that European governments had begun publishing in the years after the war, using them to reconstruct exactly which government made which decision, and when, during the crisis's final weeks.

The book's central argument put Schmitt at the center of a bitter scholarly dispute over who actually caused the war: where revisionist historians of the 1920s had argued that Serbia and Russia bore as much responsibility as Germany and Austria Hungary, Schmitt concluded that Germany had indeed been largely responsible for the catastrophe, backing Austria Hungary's aggressive response to Sarajevo and failing to restrain the crisis when restraint might still have prevented a general war. That conclusion made the book the leading statement of what became known as the orthodox school on the war's origins, directly opposed to the revisionist position associated with the historian Sidney Fay.

Reading the book means following a genuinely contested historical argument made with the diplomatic record laid out week by week, not a settled verdict but one side of a debate that would keep running for decades afterward. It suits a reader interested in how five weeks of diplomatic decisions, made by officials who mostly did not want a general war, produced one anyway, and in how historians have argued ever since about who bears the blame.