History Lesson - Part II

"Indeed what remains striking about those hot July weeks is the role not of collective forces nor of long-range factors, but of the individual... Domestically Berchtold, Sazonov, and Bethmann Hollweg had acquired reputations for diplomatic weakness, which they now felt the need to counter by appearing strong. But even this interpretation fuses the individual with wider national pressures.

More bizarre is the conjunction of the individual with accident - the wrong turn of Archduke Franz Ferdinand's driver and the fortuitous positioning of Princip who had already assumed his assassination attempt had failed...

And Conrad von Hötzendorff, whose advocacy of preventive war proved so important to Austrian calculations at the beginning of July - were his motives patriotic or personal? He calculated that, as a war hero, he would be free to marry his beloved Gina von Reininghaus, already the wife of another. Conrad's infatuation cannot, obviously, explain the outbreak of the First World War. But it remains a reminder that the most banal and maudlin emotions, as well as the most deeply felt, interacted with the wider context."

- Hew Strachan, The Outbreak of the First World War, pg. 126-7