The War That Ended Peace: The Road to 1914 by Margaret MacMillan

Introduction: War or Peace?
    There have been as many plagues as wars in history; yet always wars and plagues take people equally by surprise.
    —Albert Camus, The Plague
    Nothing that ever happened, nothing that was ever even willed, planned or envisaged, could seem irrelevant. War is not an accident: it is an outcome.
    One cannot look back too far to ask, of what?
    —Elizabeth Bowen, Bowen’s Court
    Louvain was a dull place, said a guidebook in 1910, but when the time came it made a spectacular fire. None of its inhabitants could have expected such a fate for their beautiful and civilised little town. Prosperous and peaceful over many centuries, it was known for its collection of wonderful churches, ancient houses, a superb Gothic town hall and a famous university which had been founded in 1425. The university library, in the distinguished old Cloth Hall, held some 200,000 books including many great works of theology and classics as well as a rich collection of manuscripts which ranged from a little collection of songs written down by a monk in the ninth century to illuminated manuscripts over which the monks had toiled for years. In late August 1914, however, as the smell of smoke filled the air, the flames that destroyed Louvain could be seen from miles away. Much of the town, including its great library, went while its desperate inhabitants, in scenes that would become all too familiar to thetwentieth-century world, struggled out into the countryside carrying what belongings they could.
    Like much of Belgium, Louvain had the misfortune to be on the route of the German invasion of France in the Great War that broke out in the summer of 1914 and which was to last until 11 November 1918. The German war plans called for a two-front war with a holding action against Russia, the enemy in the east, and a rapid invasion and defeat of France in the west. Belgium, a neutral country, was meant to acquiesce quietly as German troops marched through on their way southwards. As with so much of what later happened in the Great War, those assumptions turned out to be very wrong. The Belgian government decided to resist, which immediately threw the German plans out, and the British, after some hesitation, entered the war against Germany. By the time the German troops arrived in Louvain on 19 August they were already resentful at what they saw as an unreasonable Belgian resistance and they were nervous about being attacked by Belgian and British troops as well as by ordinary civilians who might decide to take up arms.
    For the first few days all went well: the Germans behaved correctly and the citizens of Louvain were too afraid to show any hostility to the invaders. On 25 August new German troops arrived, retreating from a Belgian counter-attack, and rumours spread that the British were coming. Shots were fired, most likely by the nervous and perhaps drunken German soldiers. Panic mounted among the Germans, who were convinced that they were under attack, and the first of the reprisals started. That night and in the next days civilians were dragged out of their houses and a number, including the mayor, the head of the university, and several police officers, were shot out of hand. By the end some 250 out of a population of around 10,000 were dead and many more had been beaten up and insulted. Fifteen hundred inhabitants of Louvain, from babies to grandparents, were put on a train and sent to Germany where the crowds greeted them with taunts and insults.
    The German soldiers – and their officers frequently joined in – sacked the town, looting and pillaging and deliberately setting buildings on fire. Eleven hundred of Louvain’s 9,000 houses were destroyed. A fifteenth-century church went up in flames and its roof caved in. Around midnight on 25 August, German soldiers went into the libraryand poured petrol about. By morning the building was a ruin and its collection no longer existed, although the fires smouldered on for several days