In summer 1914, the world went to war.

Now 110 years later, we go back to those figures, to those debates, to those questions,

in the greatest failure in the history of diplomacy.

I am Dr. Zach Twomley. You're listening to When Diplomacy Fails, will even at the last time. I trust in God that he will even at the last hour bring the Tsar to his senses and avert the frightful disaster which Russia's procedure threatens to bring upon the world.

Should that not be possible, however, I trust that shoulder to shoulder we may win victory in the war

that has been forced upon us, just as we have been unitedly striving with all our strength now

for over five and thirty years to maintain peace. Kaiser Wilhelm to Emperor Franz

Joseph in an unused draft telegram, 31st of July 1914.

The countdown to the First World War involved a morass of miniature struggles which each government had to fight.

These included the struggle for military preparations, the struggle to persuade the population that the cause was just, and the

simultaneous struggle to persuade Europe of the same thing. One struggle which is easy to overlook

in our era of instantaneous communications is the struggle for up-to-date information. By the 31st of July,

one could argue that Germany had surged ahead in this struggle

and was the most informed of all contemporary governments.

Unfortunately, as Berlin discovered,

not all who participated in this struggle for information were playing by the same rules.

We left the last episode on something of a cliffhanger,

while Ambassador Portelae

managed to report Russian General Mobilization back to Berlin before noon. His counterparts,

Buchanan, representing Britain, and Palliologue representing France, took much longer. These delays

affected the information available to Paris and London, but they also

influenced how those governments interpreted the crisis and, critically, how they interpreted

...