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.

And this is the July Crisis. There is only one thing that can be imagined worse than a war, and that is a European

war in which England did not play the game. Britain's Morning Post newspaper comments

on the crisis 1st August 1914. Saturday the 1st of August was supposed to be

the beginning of a bank holiday weekend. Families who could departed the city for the countryside

or to the seaside to soak in some unseasonably persistent sunshine, and in these places,

the country seemed somehow removed from the crisis

on the continent. In reality, of course, the deteriorating situation was the talk of the government,

and it had increasingly become the talk of the press. By this point, Sir Edward Gray had consistently

failed to make any headway in his diplomatic offerings.

Austria, Russia and Germany had all made positive noises, but none were willing to abandon

key principles as a preliminary to sitting at a peace table. The Foreign Secretary was also

grappling with a serious problem, divisions within the Cabinet, which profoundly affected his ability to settle on a coherent

policy. Nor had Parliament been consulted, though the date of Monday the 3rd of August had been set

as the place for these debates on British policy, which would be hashed out. Such an occasion was

well overdue since Britons had been left with little in the way of official

news by their government and were compelled to rely on equally divided newspapers. While the

government grappled with the crisis, pressure campaigns were waged against it to make a choice.

The French were the most persistent for understandable reasons, having arranged

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