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a new class of warship, the
Dreadnought
, which carried guns of a size and power never before deployed at sea. Armies swelled in size as well. To keep pace with each other, France and Germany introduced conscription. Nationalist fervor was on the rise. Austria-Hungary and Serbia shared a simmering mutual resentment. The Serbs nurtured pan-Slavic ambitions that threatened the skein of territories and ethnicities that made up the Austro-Hungarian empire (typically referred to simply as Austria). These included such restive lands as Herzegovina, Bosnia, and Croatia. As one historian put it, “Europe had too many frontiers, too many—and too well-remembered—histories, too many soldiers for safety.”
    And secretly, nations began planning for how to use these soldiers should the need arise.As early as 1912, Britain’s Committee of Imperial Defence had planned that in the event of war with Germany, the first act would be to cut Germany’s transoceanic telegraph cables.In Germany, meanwhile, generals tinkered with a detailed plan crafted by Field Marshal Alfred von Schlieffen, the centerpiece of which was a vast maneuver that would bring German forces through neutral Belgium and down into France, thus skirting defenses arrayed along the French frontier. That Britain might object—indeed, would be compelled to intervene, as a co-guarantor of Belgian neutrality—seemed not to weigh heavily on anyone’s mind. Schlieffen calculated that the war in France would be over in forty-two days, after which German forces would reverse course and march toward Russia. What he failed to take into account was what would happen if German forces did not prevail in the time allotted and if Britain did join the fray.
    The war began with the geopolitical equivalent of a brush fire. In late June, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, inspector general of the Austro-Hungarian army, traveled to Bosnia, which Austria had annexed in 1908. While driving through Sarajevo, he was shot dead by an assassin sponsored by the Black Hand, a group devotedto unifying Serbia and Bosnia. On July 28, Austria stunned the world by declaring war on Serbia.
    “It’s incredible—incredible,” Wilson said, during lunch with his daughter, Nell, and her husband, William McAdoo, secretary of the Treasury. Wilson could give the incident only scant attention, however. At the time, his wife lay gravely ill, and this alone consumed his heart and mind. He cautioned his daughter, “Don’t tell your mother anything about it.”
    The dispute between Austria and Serbia could have ended there: a small war against a disruptive Balkan country. But within a week, the brush fire gusted into a firestorm, spiking fears, resurrecting animosities, triggering alliances and understandings, and setting long-laid plans in motion. On Tuesday, August 4, following the Schlieffen plan, German forces entered Belgium, dragging behind them giant fortress-busting guns capable of launching shells weighing 2,000 pounds apiece. Britain declared war, siding with Russia and France, the “Allies”; Germany and Austria-Hungary linked arms as the “Central Powers.” That same day, Wilson declared America to be neutral in an executive proclamation that barred the warships of Germany and Britain and all other belligerents from entering U.S. ports. Later, a week after his wife’s funeral, struggling against his personal grief to address the larger trauma of the world, Wilson told the nation, “We must be impartial in thought as well as in action, must put a curb upon our sentiments as well as upon every transaction that might be construed as a preference of one party to the struggle before another.”
    He had the full support of the American public. A British journalist, Sydney Brooks, writing in the
North American Review
, gauged America to be just as isolationist as ever. And why not, he asked? “The United States is remote, unconquerable, huge, without hostile neighbors or any neighbors at all of anything like