Dennis Prager Show - Timeless Wisdom - Learn History with Dennis Prager - Part 7

Nov. 5, 2025 - Dennis Prager Show

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Timeless Wisdom - Learn History with Dennis Prager - Part 7

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	Welcome to Timeless Wisdom with Dennis Prager.
	Hear thousands of hours of Dennis' lectures, courses, and classic radio programs.
	And to purchase Dennis Prager's Rational Bibles, go to DennisPrager.com.
	Hello, everybody.
	Welcome to the Dennis Prager Show.
	Periodically now, I feature what I call a history hour because I think that it's the most important thing to know in terms of facts, in terms of understanding, in terms of understanding why we are where we are.
	How could you know that if you don't know what happened before we got here?
	And so I am enthralled by the subject for every possible reason.
	And what I do is I feature a new work of history that I think is particularly significant.
	And this one is about a subject that I have been mesmerized by my entire life.
	I consider the answer, however, to be analogous to why did God invent the mosquito.
	I have a series of questions that I know that there probably isn't an answer to.
	So if anybody wrote a book, why mosquitoes are beneficial, I would be fascinated.
	Likewise, why did World War I occur?
	There are 25,000 books and articles on that subject.
	There are probably 10 on why did World War II occur, because everybody knows why World War II occurred, so it's not an issue.
	World War I, though, which created World War II, which created Nazism, which created communism, which created fascism, everything horrible that you could imagine more or less derives from World War I.
	So I have been enthralled by it.
	There is a new book by Christopher Clark, who is a professor of modern European history at Cambridge, of course, in the UK, has written The Sleepwalkers.
	What a great title, by the way.
	They sleepwalked right into a world conflagration.
	How Europe Went to War in 1914, Christopher Clark.
	And it is published by Harper.
	It is, of course, up at dennisprager.com.
	Professor Clark, welcome to the Dennis Prager Show.
	Hello, Dennis.
	I'm delighted to join you.
	Thank you.
	I just want to say that I had mentioned to you right before going on air what I have said on air a number of times.
	Britain produces a disproportionate number of great historians, and I have them on the show, and everyone, though this will mean nothing to you, hits a home run.
	I thought I would deliberately use a perfectly irrelevant American metaphor.
	I have a rough idea what a home run is.
	Yeah, that's it.
	Like, I have a rough idea what something in cricket is.
	Very rough, I might add.
	I have no idea what they're doing there.
	That, I must say, is up there with the origins of World War I.
	To me, cricket and the origins of World War I are analogously complex.
	Now, you, sir, you have courage because to write on this subject takes a certain amount of what we say here, chutzpah.
	Is that fair to say?
	Yeah, I think it takes some points for it.
	I have to admit that.
	I think it has to be the most the crisis that produced this war in 1914, I think, is possibly the most complex political event of modern times.
	It may even be the most complex political event of all times.
	It is just extremely difficult to unravel.
	So, yes, you need a dose of chutzpah to even begin doing this.
	So, what prompted you?
	Did you feel that essentially all the major works prior to yours had failed in some way?
	No, no, and I mean that very sincerely.
	I guess all of us who write books must think that at some point.
	Well, it's not so much that, because I mean, this is an extraordinary debate.
	You know, the history of writing on the outbreak of the First World War is unique in the history of historiography and the history of historical writing.
	It's a hundred-year-old debate.
	It started even before the World War began.
	I mean, people started accusing each other of starting a war or being about to start a war even before the first shots were fired.
	So, this debate is older than the war itself, and it's about to enter its end its first century, and it shows no signs of drying up.
	But the problem with this debate is not that the works have been, I mean, I think there have been many wonderful works of history.
	It's engaged some of the best historical minds, this question, with good reason.
	Nevertheless, it seemed to me that it was still worth, despite all that burden of accumulated scholarship, it was still worth thinking again about this crisis, because it seemed to me that from the perspective of 2013, from the perspective of the 21st century, the crisis looked different from the way it did even 20 or 30 years ago, certainly very different from the way it looked when I was at school.
	We're in such a different world now.
	We're in a world much more like the world of 1914 than we were before.
	If you think about the fact we're only just coming to terms with the end of the Cold War, we now in a war which in a world which is no longer disciplined by the standoff between two hyper-powers, between two superpowers, the Soviet Union and the United States, instead we have a polycentric world with many threats, with many regional conflicts, with rising powers and empires that may feel they're in decline.
	I won't say which empire I'm thinking of, but there is such a thing as an empire that fears it may be in decline.
	We have rising powers just as one did in 1914.
	And so in many ways, the world is complex and unpredictable now in a way that it was in 1914.
	And so the crisis, in a weird paradoxical way, the crisis of 1914 is closer to us now than it was 20 or 30 years ago.
	The general assessment, the one I grew up with, and probably you grew up with, was the one that was stated during and the end of the war, prompted the Treaty of Versailles, and that is that Germany was largely at fault.
	Your take is, and it's a very powerful phrase, that this was a tragedy, World War I, rather than a crime.
	So you don't think that there is one primary criminal, is that correct?
	That's absolutely right.
	I mean, I too, like you, I was brought up on exactly that story, that there was one bad Apple state, there was one bad state that wanted to start a fight, and this fight was forced on everybody else by the Germans, by Germany.
	And I remember a teacher telling us, if you do an exam question on the outbreak of the First World War, just remember the five German provocations.
	Just list the five bad things the Germans did, building a huge navy, challenging the French over Morocco, issuing a letter of support to the Austrians after the assassinations at Sarajevo.
	A sort of list of German provocations.
	And that was in those days, that was how most school teachers and most historians explained the war.
	It was caused by one state.
	But even as a schoolboy, that didn't really make sense to me.
	I mean, one of the key problems in the narrative of how this war broke out is the fact that the first state to mobilize its forces is not Germany, but Russia.
	And that already sort of created a question mark at the back of my head.
	You know, how could one reconcile that fact with the idea of German sole culpability?
	And the more closely I looked at the crisis that brought this war about, at the whole background of the war, the more it seemed to me that all of the great powers, to differing degrees, but certainly Germany, France, Russia, Austria, and to a lesser extent Italy, they were all implicated in this process.
	This was a genuinely interactive breakdown.
	It was, if you like, a continental crisis.
	This was Europe committing suicide.
	It wasn't a story about how an otherwise peaceful scene was disturbed by the arrival of a psychopathic new power.
	The role of Russia becomes very clear.
	Am I mistaken that Barbara Tuchman, the famous American historian in The Guns of August, does not date Russian mobilization correctly?
	Well, that is true, but actually, I'm a great admirer of Tuchman's book.
	I think it's a fantastic book.
	Oh, that's good to know.
	That is so.
	I'm happy to hear that.
	No, I am happy to hear that because I have great admiration for her writing.
	She was not an academician, but she was a great historian.
	Go ahead.
	She was a great historian, absolutely, for exactly.
	And she really knew how to write, which all historians should know how to write, and quite a few do.
	Let's just leave it at that.
	But the point is that, yeah, what Barbara Tuchman did was to evoke a world of which seemed her book is a kind of period drama.
	It's full of exotic uniforms and beautiful scenery and elaborate dinners and Lord Salisbury riding to the House of Commons on a tricycle being pushed by his butler James and this kind of thing.
	And so she conjures up the image of a world which is bygone, a world of a bygone age.
	Whereas what I was trying to do in my book was to bring out the modernity of this crisis.
	It's very raw and very modern.
	So let me go back to Russia for a moment.
	Oh, yes, Russia.
	Yes, exactly.
	Okay, sorry.
	No, no, that's quite all right.
	Well, let me just be exact here.
	I don't understand why Russia wasn't blamed more given that it mobilized.
	And you write in your book that it was the country primarily responsible for a European arms race beginning in the first decade of the 20th century.
	Absolutely.
	Well, I mean, I think the chief reason for this, for Russia's getting off any kind of charge, is simply that they were on our side.
	We were fighting with them.
	All right, we'll continue in a moment.
	Let me reintroduce.
	Christopher Clark teaches history at Cambridge University in the UK.
	The Sleepwalkers, How Europe Went to War in 1914, a history hour on the Dennis Prager show.
	Hi, everybody.
	Dennis Prager, and this is a history hour.
	Periodically broadcast on my show because history explains much, if not everything, but more than any other single thing about how we are, how we have gotten where we are.
	Nothing is more important than World War I because it created the horrors of the 20th century, or at least led to them.
	The origins of World War I may be the most complex subject we have in history.
	New book on this is The Sleepwalkers, How Europe Went to War in 1914.
	Christopher Clark is the author.
	Is a professor of modern European history at the University of Cambridge in the UK, and he does not blame any single country.
	And the book is pretty compelling in that way.
	And I was certainly led to believe, and so many others were, that Germany was to be blamed.
	Russia is a big problem in.
	We were talking about Russia and its it was it mobilized troops before Germany did leading to the war and it had precipitated an arms race.
	So why so you say Russia was not given the blame it deserved because we fought alongside them in World War I, we being in the United States, for example.
	Yeah, I mean, I think history is written by the winners.
	Yes.
	No, no, that's fair.
	Yes.
	But what so what prompted the United States to join a war where there were no villains?
	Well, actually, the predominant view in the United States was exactly that.
	The real question is, why did the United States stay out of the war?
	And the reason was exactly the one you've given, that the predominant view in Washington was, well, there aren't really any villains in this war.
	This is a nasty European tribal war.
	They've been at this for centuries.
	It's their nasty secret diplomacy.
	They're oncier regime politics.
	They're not true democracies.
	They're not like the United States.
	That's why they're having this awful war, and we shouldn't pick sides.
	This is one of the and of course that was a view with a lot to be said for it.
	The reasons for America's entry into the war, well, that's, of course, in itself a very complex issue, which I don't discuss in the book, but they have much more to do with the gradual drift of the White House towards a pro-Entente position, and of course, led by President Woodrow Wilson, and also the provocation offered by the Germans in deciding to opt for unlimited submarine warfare, which inevitably caused massive damage to American shipping and also loss of American lives on the high seas.
	And so America ended up going into war in the name of freedom of the seas on the side of the Entente.
	But what about Germany's actions in Belgium, for example?
	Didn't Germany make a bad name for itself, or was that propaganda?
	No, it did make a bad name for itself.
	The Germans behaved very badly in Belgium.
	They killed approximately, according to an excellent assessment of these atrocities by the historians Kramer and Horn of the University of Dublin.
	They killed about 6,000 citizens in a series of atrocious crimes.
	Of course, the Russians also committed crimes in East Prussia and Eastern Germany when they broke in, when they invaded Eastern Germany in 1914.
	The Austrians also committed atrocities in Serbia.
	That early phase of the war was...
	And the Serbians had committed atrocities in Albania.
	Well, indeed, that's true as well.
	And so the war had that sort of nastiness, especially in the first phase.
	But that's not the reason why the war broke out.
	That's, of course, a consequence of the wars breaking out, not a cause.
	And it wasn't the reason why Britain entered the war, although it was the reason why the British public were told Britain ought to enter the war.
	Okay, so this is exactly what I want to do with you for the because, I mean, I wish we had many hours.
	We have an hour.
	So I'm going to go country by country of the major protagonists.
	Tell me what they did and why they went into the war.
	All right, let's begin with Britain.
	Well, Britain, in a sense, comes last because Britain is the last of the great powers to join this awful conflagration.
	Why did they join it?
	By the time they decide to join us on the 3rd of August, the war is already underway.
	So it's a question of what you do with the war that's already happening.
	And when that prospect faced the British government, the reasoning that was made by Edward Gray, Sir Edward Gray, the then foreign secretary, the foreign minister effectively, Minister of Foreign Affairs, his reasoning was: if we stand aside and the Entente and the Franco-French and the Russians win, that will be a very lonely world for us.
	The French will no longer be our friends.
	India will be exposed to possible Russian invasions through Afghanistan and Pakistan, or the areas that are now known as Pakistan.
	And we'll be very exposed on our imperial periphery.
	We'll probably lose our empire.
	It will be a nasty future for us.
	If, on the other hand, the Germans and the Austrians win, well, the Germans will effectively secure kind of a Gameni, a sort of dominance on the continent.
	That won't be much fun for us either.
	So the argument was we must join, take a side, and the side we should take is that of the Entente.
	The Entente is Russia, France, and Russia and France.
	Russia and France.
	And the Entente was actually the name given to the relationship between Britain and France.
	But they decided to side with France and Russia for complicated reasons.
	One of which was that they thought by joining with France and Russia, they could prevent Russia from threatening the British Empire on its most vulnerable peripheries.
	Did they give moral reasons, or that wasn't necessary in those days?
	Moral reasons?
	Yes.
	Well, you always need a moral reason to enter into war, and the moral reason they gave was that they had an obligation to France, an obligation to help France, because France was Britain's friend.
	That was the meaning of the Entente.
	All right, why was France in the war?
	France was in the war because France had committed and made a commitment to Russia, which starts to sort of harden up from 1912 onwards, in which they had said, if you feel the need to attack Austria-Hungary because of a sort of Balkan quarrel between Serbia and Austria, then we will stand by you.
	We will honor our obligations as allies.
	In other words, the French had allowed themselves to be sucked into a Balkan quarrel involving Russia.
	Yes, it would seem completely irrelevant to France.
	Exactly.
	And until 1912, the French had repeatedly warned the Russians, don't count on us if you get involved in the Balkans.
	That all changes in 1912, partly because the French are worried that if they don't support Russia in the Balkans, there will never be in the future a conflict in which Russia and France will fight together.
	At some future point, they will have to face the Germans on their own.
	That was the French fear.
	And they didn't trust the British to come to their aid.
	So, in order to counter their uncertainty about British support, because the messages are not.
	And because they were even then afraid of Germany?
	The French were afraid of Germany.
	I mean, the French relationship with Germany was poisoned by the War of 1870.
	Ever since the formation of the German Empire, the French had refused to come to any kind of terms with Germany because Germany had taken from them these two provinces.
	I'm laughing only because I want now my elicitors better understand perhaps why we both feel this is the most complex subject in history, literally in history.
	But it is beyond riveting and unbelievably important.
	What the lessons are, I would like to ask the professor as well.
	The book is The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914.
	Christopher Clark, up at dennisprager.com.
	We resume momentarily.
	Dennis Prager here, a history hour, periodically broadcast some major new work of history.
	This one is The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914.
	Professor Christopher Clark teaches modern European history at Cambridge University in the UK.
	And we're going country by country to try to make this as simple, not simplistic, as possible.
	It's a very difficult endeavor to simplify the roots of World War I.
	But we spoke about France, we spoke about Britain, and now we're speaking about France.
	So let me review here so I can understand.
	So France is Russia's ally because if France does not ally itself with Russia, it exposes itself to Germany.
	Exactly.
	And it fears Germany because of prior experience and because of the increasing growth and strength of Germany.
	Absolutely.
	I mean, the background to all this is Germany's titanic economic growth.
	I mean, the German economy is growing at a staggering rate, and Germany is pulling past almost everybody else.
	It's now the second largest industrial producer after the United States.
	Which itself has pulled ahead, leaving Britain in third place.
	So according to all the contemporary, conventional contemporary indices of growth and industrial power, Germany is really experiencing a titanic age of expansion.
	And people are frightened by that.
	Just as today, when people look at China, they see this dizzying economic growth of China.
	They find that unsettling.
	It was exactly like that in the years before 1914.
	Okay.
	Now, Russia, which is well, let me ask you this.
	Why would you not say that Russia was the villain?
	Well, for several reasons.
	The first is that I don't really think that the First World War wasn't caused by the action of any single power.
	So, I mean, the Russians, if we pin it all on Russian mobilization and say it's because the Russians mobilized that the First World War came about, well, then you'd have to ask, well, why did they mobilize?
	They mobilized because the Austrians intended to carry out a punitive military strike against Serbia.
	So then you have to ask, well, why did the Austrians plan to do that?
	Well, that's because two assassinations had occurred in Sarajevo of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife, Sophie.
	These had been carried out by a terror squad which was sort of steered from Belgrade, but not necessarily by the Serbian government as such, but had powerful backers within the Serbian state structure.
	Is that a good enough reason?
	So the point is, as soon as you identify one particular action, you're not going to go to other actions.
	Why not blame these other people?
	But the Russian support for the Serbs, and I have to talk to you about that because it's riveting the chapters on the Serbs, but the Russian support for the Serbs sounds to me less political than romantic.
	There was a romantic dimension to Russian support for the Serbs.
	The Russians, the sort of Russian national heart had always skipped or had always beaten, particularly hard for the Serbian cause.
	You know, if you think of the fact that at the end of the great novel by Tolstoy and the Karenina, one of the key protagonists, he disappears off the scene.
	Where is he going?
	He's going off to fight as a volunteer in Serbia against the Ottoman Empire.
	So, you know, this Serbian - there is a sort of traditional relationship between Russian national feeling and the Serbian cause of Serbian freedom.
	There's no doubt about that.
	But nevertheless, I think the decisions the Russians made in 1914 were cool-headed decisions founded on their understanding of national interest.
	And that national interest was?
	Well, it was about two things.
	One was to hold the Austro-Hungarian Empire in the Balkans in check as much as possible by An increasingly powerful and hostile state, Serbia, right on the borders of Austria-Hungary.
	But the larger objective that that was intended to serve was strategic control in the longer term of the Turkish Straits, of the Dardanelles, the waterway which links the Black Sea to the eastern Mediterranean.
	The Russians desperately wanted to get free access to this waterway so they could project naval power out into the eastern Mediterranean and at the same time secure their export routes for grain and other products on which their export income on which their economy desperately depended.
	Well, folks, as you see, the more you know about this subject, the more you realize not only the complexity, but it is, in a sense, they're all villains.
	Or, as you put it in your title, Sleepwalkers, which we will explain in a moment.
	Want to talk about the Serbs and the Austrians and the Germans?
	It's riveting reading the worst thing that happened, World War I, The Sleepwalkers, Christopher Clark.
	Hi, everybody.
	Dennis Prager here, a history hour with Professor Christopher Clark, Professor of Modern European History at Cambridge in the UK, The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914.
	And were it's about a hundred years.
	June 28th, 1914, the shot heard round the world when Serbians, two, one, how many Serbians were engaged?
	Just princip or others?
	There were seven.
	One of them was not a Serb.
	He was a Bosnian Muslim, but the rest were Serbs.
	That's to say they were ethnically Serbian.
	They were not subject to the Serbian state, but they were ethnically Serb.
	Murdered the Archduke Ferdinand.
	And what is particularly fascinating to me in your book is that Ferdinand wanted peace.
	He did.
	This is one of the tragedies of 1914: in killing the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, these assassins actually ruined Europe's best hope for peace.
	Because this is a man who at every opportunity had argued against military adventures in the Balkans, had insisted that the Austro-Hungarian Empire was too fragile to risk any kind of military demarch against any of its neighbors, and had always argued the case for peace.
	So why don't you do this with each country?
	So why don't you blame the Serbs?
	Well, you know, the Serbs were dealt a very difficult hand.
	I mean, you've got a country which, with a long tradition of armed struggle against a fairly ruthless regime, the regime of the Ottoman Empire.
	They'd been under the control of the Ottomans since the high Middle Ages.
	They'd only started to emerge from Ottoman control in the 19th century.
	And this is a very bitter and bloody process which involves numerous insurrections and revolutions, some of which are put down in a very brutal way.
	So when they finally emerge as an independent state in 1878, they're kind of marked by this history where national identity and armed struggle simply are not separable.
	You know, they're not the only state in the world to have this experience.
	But forgive me, the Austro-Hungarian Empire is not the Ottoman Empire.
	No, it's not.
	The Serbs are not, Serbia as such, the state of Serbia is the former Ottoman position, which frees itself from the Ottomans in the process of pushing the Ottomans down to the southeast of Europe.
	And the Ottomans are eventually, during the Balkan Wars of 1912 and 1913, pushed almost right out of Europe.
	So this is the bit of Europe which is still under Turkish control, and that's where the...
	Right, but in effect, they're blaming the Austro-Hungarian Empire with all its flaws, which is hardly like the Ottoman Empire.
	The Serbs are placing guilt on Austro-Hungary, Austria-Hungary, that really pertains to the Ottomans.
	Well, they start to focus on Austria-Hungary.
	The problem about Serbia is there's the Serbia for the map, which you can see, you know, the boundaries of which you can see on any map of 19th century Europe.
	And then there's the Serbia of ethnic settlement, which is the place which includes all the places where Serbs or people who speak Serbian dialects live.
	And that includes bits of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, most importantly, Bosnia-Herzegovina, which is about 40-odd percent Serb speakers, parts of little bits and bobs of Albania, southern Hungary, the Voivodina, and so on, very substantial Serbian populations.
	So there are Serbs living outside political Serbia.
	And so what the Serbian nationalist political elite want to do is reunify these Serbs in a larger Serbia, a sort of pan-Serbia, a greater Serbia.
	Well, why will killing Archduke Ferdinand help that cause?
	Well, because they feared that if Archduke Franz Ferdinand were to come to the throne, and everybody expected he would come to the throne soon because the reigning emperor was very, very elderly by this point, that if he were to come to the throne, everybody knew he was going to restructure the Austro-Hungarian Empire and give more autonomy to the Slavs,
	the South Slavs around Croatia, and thereby create a sort of South Slav entity inside the Austro-Hungarian Empire, which might have been a more attractive homeland for the Serbs, the Serbs of the Austrian Empire, and thereby have prevented Belgrade from unifying all the Serbs of the Balkans into one sort of Serbian superstate.
	So they hated him for that reason, but they hated the Hesper monarchy because they regarded its lands as containing unredeemed areas of Serbian inhabitation, which they intended to take for themselves.
	And until wait, this is the one part I have not followed.
	They kill Archduke Ferdinand, who was in fact a peace lover, and thinking that if he is killed, he would not be able, once ascending to the throne, as it were, of Austro-Hungary.
	He would not be able to do what he wanted, which I don't understand.
	What would he do that they thought would be bad for the Serbs?
	Well, actually, he was renowned for his pro-Slav sentiments.
	Yes, so I don't understand.
	You're making a very good point.
	But don't you think revolutionaries often behave this way?
	That the real enemy of the radical, of the radicalized revolutionary.
	Is the moderate.
	Is the moderate.
	All right, so it was a pointless assassination.
	Well, it was pointless.
	It's pointless from a sort of humane modern perspective.
	No, no, no, no.
	Pointless from a Serbian perspective.
	Well, no, because in the end, look, they got what they wanted.
	Yugoslavia was created.
	Serbia dominated that state.
	You know, Bosnia and Herzegovina were absorbed in.
	Because of World War I. Because of World War I.
	The Yugoslavs, I mean, they paid a huge price.
	The Serbs paid an immense price in blood for this conflict.
	But in the end, in political terms, the South Slav state emerged as one of the victors.
	And finally, Germany.
	You don't even mention Germany in part one of your book.
	No, because part one of the book is focused on the original quarrel between Serbia and Austria.
	I wanted to understand that and really get to the bottom of it.
	What's going on between these states, between these two?
	And Serbia is an extremely interesting country.
	I mean, researching Serbia's history was one of the most exciting parts of what I did for that project.
	Austria is also extremely interesting and rich and complex political structure.
	I don't mention Germany there because it's about the original quarrel between the two between Serbia and Austria.
	Of course, Germany is absolutely crucial to the whole story.
	And the key point really about Germany is German fears that Austria and France are taking over.
	It's already the case by 1914 that the Franco-Russian alliance commands more than a million more troops than the Germany.
	Okay, everybody feared everybody, exactly.
	The Sleepwalkers, How Europe Went to War in 1914.
	Final segment coming up with Christopher Clark of Cambridge University.
	Hello, my friends.
	Welcome back.
	Final segment with Christopher Clark, Professor of Modern European History at Cambridge University in the UK.
	The Sleepwalkers is the book How Europe Went to War in 1914.
	It is up at dennisprager.com.
	And his life, or however long he did research for this book, led him to the conclusion, and many, including me right now, are buying it, that it's very hard to pick one villain in causing World War I.
	So let me ask you some hypotheticals as we unfortunately come to a close of this hour.
	Had the assassination of the Archduke Ferdinand not taken place, would there have been a World War I?
	Quite possibly not.
	I know that sounds odd because we're often told this war was going to happen anyway.
	I don't believe that was the case.
	The key point to bear in mind is that on the morning of the 28th of June, when the Archduke and his wife turned up in Sarajevo, none of the European great powers was planning to attack one of its neighbors.
	No one had plans of that kind on the table.
	So this war was not going to happen until that assassination took place.
	I really have to take a deep breath.
	It does confirm a belief that I have had that individuals make history.
	This is always a big debate.
	Do forces make history, historical forces, or do personalities.
	So the amount of death that these seven Serbs caused is almost mind-boggling, isn't it?
	Well, one could put it that way, but remember that for me, what's in some ways much more important is that all these triggers had been built into the system around that event.
	The event itself couldn't bring about the World War.
	It could only bring about a World War II if the Austrians, as it were, decided to mount a punitive expedition.
	Quick last question.
	Did all the major antagonists believe that they would bring their troops home by Christmas?
	Yeah, that's one of the most grotesque things about the outbreak of this war is the failure of the people making the key decisions to see the full scale of what they were about to unleash.
	You know, it's not quite, it used to be, everybody used to think that everybody believed in a short war.
	In fact, there were numerous reports and indications that the war would be anything but short.
	There was a study done by the Austrian General Staff, for example, which concluded that the first year of a war using modern weapons.
	So nobody wanted to believe it?
	People, I don't think, really grasped it.
	Right, people believe what they want to believe.
	The book is The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914.
	Christopher Clark, you join my pantheon of wonderful British historians.
	For whatever that means to you, I am deeply appreciative.
	Thank you very much.
	You're very welcome.
	The book is up at dennisprager.com.
	The event that led to all the evils of the 20th century.
	Why did it happen?
	The Sleepwalkers provides an answer.
	I'm Dennis Prager.
	This has been Timeless Wisdom with Dennis Prager.

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