I read Barbara Tuchman's far-famed The Guns of August in the 1990s, when I was a bookish teenage boy. I briefly considered re-reading it ahead of the Great War centenary, but did not end up doing so. August 1914 is when the fighting started, when the crisis precipitated by the assassination of the Austro-Hungarian heir presumptive by a Serbian nationalist in the Bosnian capital of Sarajevo broke out into open warfare between British & German soldiers in Belgium. I highly recommend The Guns of August to anyone who appreciates "The Explorers' Club's" retrospective on the centenary of the World War & wants to understand better the tangled web of international alliances & secret treaties that turned the outbreak of the war into a global conflagration, a cultural suicide attempt that still haunts us in the West.
The Wayback Machine Tour of the World War: August 1914
"The Explorers' Club," № CDIV: Declarations of War, 1914
"The Explorers' Club," № CDVII: The Battle of Mons (Western Front)
"The Explorers' Club," № CDVIII: The Battle of Tannenburg (Eastern Front)
Lest we forget.
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