[male narrator] The 24th of July, 1914.

It's late at night.

A group of haggard-looking men sit in a dim room in the ministry in Belgrade.

One of them holds the Austrian ultimatum in his hands.

They've spent the day debating how to reply.

Defeated, they're about to give in to all demands.

A note is slipped under the door.

It says that the Russians have started to mobilize.

They change their reply, and the final act begins.

In their reply, the Serbians agree to nine out of ten Austrian demands.

They only refuse to allow Austrian officials to have police powers within Serbia.

But their reply is a masterstroke,

an act of genius in the way it concludes.

For, at the end, it says that if the Austrians don't find their terms to be fair,

the Serbians are more than willing to submit to the resolution of a conference.

But if you'll remember, the Austrians hate conferences.

They are always getting out-voted at those things.

Well, no more.

Not this time.

They are livid at the Serbian reply,

but like always, they turn to their German allies for advice.

The Kaiser is still at sea,

so Austrian's foreign minister Berchtold goes to consult Bethmann Hollweg

and Moltke, the head of the German army.

They are apoplectic.

They say, "What?

“You haven't declared war already?!

“A month has gone by.

“Get on with it!

“This isn't what we agreed to.

We're losing the sympathies of the people of Europe."

You see, after the assassination of the Archduke,

public opinion in Europe weighed heavily against Serbia.

It was politically impossible for anybody to support them then.

But now a month has passed,

and this reply, this meeting of most of the Austrian demands

and this offer for mediation, made the Serbs seem like the reasonable party.

After all, what more could Austria want?

So with the rebukes of the Germans driving him,

Berchtold returns to Austria-Hungary

and for the first time speaks with Conrad von Hötzendorf,

the Chief of Staff of the Austrian army.

He too is apoplectic.

"What, declare war?

“Are you kidding me?

“You needed to tell us weeks ago if that's what you wanted to do!

“The Austrian army won't be ready for war until the 14th of August, weeks from now!

“Plus, we don't even know who we're mobilizing against.

“You want us to prepare for war with Serbia?

“Yeah, not when Russia's mobilized against us, we aren't.

“Get us a guarantee of Russian neutrality and then maybe,

maybe, we can talk about mobilizing against the Serbs."

Despondent, pressured toward war by the Germans,

told that Austria isn't ready by his own Chief of Staff,

Berchtold returns home and begins to think.

As the hours grow later, he starts to convince himself there's way out of this.

He starts to reason that declaring war isn't necessarily the same as being at war.

And so maybe if he declares war now,

he'll placate the Germans and be able to use that threat

to get the Serbs to capitulate

before he even needs the Austrian army to be ready to fight.

Now we can all see this for the desperate rationalization that it is.

We've all at one time or another gotten ourselves into an impossible situation

and let ourselves believe in some wild, hair-brained solution

that'll surely fix everything.

Only when we do that, the fate of the world isn't usually hanging in a balance.

And so, on the 28th of July,

Austria-Hungary declares war on Serbia,

with Berchtold all the while believing he's going to bring peace by declaring war.

But that morning, the morning of the 28th,

Kaiser Wilhelm II got back to Potsdam.

That very morning, the Kaiser read the Serbian response

to the Austria Ultimatum and uttered,

"With this, every reason for war drops away."

And here is one of the great tragedies of those frantic July days leading to the war.

This man, Wilhelm II, for all his inadequacies, for all his failings,

for once in his life steps up and tries to become the man he should be,

the man who deserves to rule the most powerful nation in the world.

And he comes so close.

And yet, despite his best attempt, he's too late.

The world doesn't reward his effort,

things spiral into chaos, war comes, and his empire will fall.

The Kaiser tries to open peace talks,

perhaps even hold a conference,

but the Austrians will have none of it.

So he proposes a novel solution:

Halt in Belgrade.

Belgrade, the Serbian capital, is just a few miles from the Austrian border.

If the Austrian army occupies the capital,

they can declare victory and save face

while showing the rest of Europe that they don't plan to annex Serbia.

And they can do it quickly enough to perhaps keep the Russians out of the war.

But this proposal has to go through Bethmann,

and Bethmann is in Berlin.

Now get this: It's 1914, so as impossible as it seems,

there was no telephone line between Berlin and Potsdam.

So Bethmann can't reply directly.

He's pretty skeptical of the Halt in Belgrade plan,

but instead of making the drive to Potsdam for clarification,

he passes it along to German agents in Austria

with the instructions not to press the Austrians too hard to adopt it.

And he doesn't even mention that it comes from the Kaiser himself.

Meanwhile, in Russia,

Sazonov gets reports of Austrians shelling Belgrade.

These reports are false, of course.

The Austrian army won't be ready to do anything until August 14th,

but he has no way of knowing that.

So he, one of the last men opposed to full Russian mobilization,

lets the dam break

and declares himself for a full mobilization of the Russian army.

He and the Russian Chief of Staff, Yanukovych,

go to see the czar and convince him that the time has come.

General mobilization is ordered.

Night falls.

It's 1:00 AM and the czar can't sleep.

He sends a telegram to the Kaiser of Germany and it reads thus:

“I'm glad you're back.

“In this serious moment, I appeal to you to help me.

“An ignoble war has been declared to a weak country.

“The indignation in Russia shared fully by me is enormous.

“I foresee that very soon

“I shall be overwhelmed by the pressure forced upon me

“and be forced to take extreme measures, which will lead to war.

“To try and avoid such a calamity as a European war,

“I beg you in the name of our old friendship to do what you can

“to stop your allies from going too far.

Nicky.”

Now you have to remember that these two men were cousins.

They were friends.

All the avenues of diplomacy had failed.

All the standard bureaucratic mechanisms of the state were driving them to war.

So they reached out to each other, as cousins, as friends,

to see if the two of them dealing directly, person-to-person,

could avoid this war.

And in a touch that could only come from these twilight days of empire

did they not refer to each other as Czar or Kaiser.

They don't even refer to each other as Wilhelm and Nicholas,

but rather as Willy and Nicky.

The Kaiser is awake too and he responds.

A flurry of telegrams get sent back and forth.

At the end of these correspondences,

Nicholas picks up the phone, calls Yanukovych

and tells him to call off the general mobilization.

Yanukovych splutters and starts to reel off all the things

that cancelling mobilization means they're going to have to do,

but the czar says “Cancel it,” and hangs up the phone.

On the morning of the 30th, Sazonov hears what the czar has done.

He's shocked.

He pulls in the head of the Duma, the Russian parliament,

and the patriarch of the Orthodox Church

and they go in for a knockdown, drag-out meeting with the czar.

The room is crowded, it's hot, talks are getting nowhere,

and then Nicholas moves off alone, staring out the window at St. Petersburg, trying to think.

After a few minutes of reflection, coming to no conclusion,

a young man, an aide to Kemp, standing near the czar says,

“Majesty, we know how difficult it must be for you to decide.”

Without intention, these words cut.

Nicolas had always been called the weak, indecisive, feckless leader,

and he hated it.

He wanted to shake off all those names people had been calling him for so many years.

He wanted to show the world he wasn't some wishy-washy prince

who couldn't make up his mind.

And so like that, with the words from some aide to Kemp

whose name history has forgotten,

Nicolas turns around and says, “I will sign the order.”

Back in Germany, Bethmann has finally come around.

They're starting to make progress with the Austrians on the Halt in Belgrade plan.

The British have even said that this plan has their support.

But Berchtold won't accept it,

can't accept it unless the Russians agree to halt their mobilization.

And here we hit the Catch-22 of the First World War.

This is the age of the train,

the period where logistics and timetables dominated military thinking.

All around Europe, it was thought that if you could just get your army

to the battlefield while the other guy's forces were still arriving,

you'd crush them every time.

You'd win without contest.

And as we've seen with the Austrians, mobilization can take weeks.

It is a Herculean task to coordinate and move the millions of men

that made up a modern army.

And if Russia acquiesces and has her army stand down,

they will be impossibly behind.

If they stop mobilization and then Austria or Germany decide to attack,

they'll have lost the war without a fight.

So Russia can't stop mobilization.

But if Russia mobilizes, that means Germany has to mobilize too

or face the same dilemma.

And now with Germany mobilized,

what can France do but mobilize themselves?

After all, the Franco-Russian War taught them a hard, bitter lesson

about what happens when you get your army to the field too slowly,

and they will not be making that mistake again.

And so the dominoes start to fall.

But there's one last attempt,

one last try to stop that crushing chain of causality

leading the world inextricably to war.

Portales, the poor German diplomat playing a bit part in a tragedy

that he has the desire but not the means to avert,

has one last meeting with Sazonov.

He says to Sazonov, “Call off the general mobilization.”

And Sazonov says, “No.”

Portales pleads,

“For God's sake, there will be no winner in this war.

“If we fight, it'll be a revolution.

“It will be the end of monarchy.

“It will be the end of us both!

Won't you please call off this madness?”

And Sazonov says, “No.”

Portales drops to his knees and says,

“If you do this, it will be slaughter.

“I beg of you in the name of all that is right and decent,

call off this mobilization.”

And Sazonov says, “No.”

Then Portales rises to his feet and takes a piece of paper from his pocket,

and says, “In that case, sir, I have the honor to inform you that we're at war.”

He stilled, struggling to collect himself, saying,

“Never thought I'd be leaving Russia like this.

I don't know how I'll be able to pack.”

Sazonov kindly offers to send somebody to help gather his things,

and a month later, a million men are dead.

The seminal catastrophe has begun.

[Choir singing “In Flanders Fields” by John McCrae]

♪ In Flanders Fields the poppies blow Between the crosses, row on row ♪

♪ That mark our place; and in the sky The larks, still bravely singing, fly ♪