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War Declared a. The
Austrian Ultimatum and the Role of Germany
Although all the European governments were responsible in greater or less degree for the development of the system of alliances and for the huge accumulation of armaments, and to that extent contributed to the tension that came to a head in July 1914, they were not equally responsible for the fatal outcome of the crisis. Immediately after the war began, the governments began to issue collections of diplomatic documents; these came to be known by the colors of the covers in which they were bound: the German collection as a White Book, the Austrian as a Red Book, and the Russian, French, British, Belgian, and Serbian as Orange, Yellow, Blue, Gray, and Blue Books, respectively. Each government set forth its case in these books and laid the blame for the war on the enemy; it sought not only to convince its own people of the rightness of its conduct, but to obtain the goodwill of neutral countries, especially the United States. All during the war hot debate raged over this question
of war guilt. The Evidence in the Case (1914), a book by James Montgomery
Beck, an eminent American lawyer, placed the blame for the war primarily
on Germany and enjoyed a wide circulation. After the war, when secret
archives began to be opened, much fuller collections of documents were
published, and these were selected by historians rather than by politicians
and propagandists. It was then seen that the documents issued in 1914
had been chosen to make out a case, and that they had often been tampered
with. Sometimes texts had been changed; awkward documents had been omitted,
and occasionally documents had been fabricated to order. From the fairly
complete diplomatic files of the Austrian, British, French, German,
and Russian governments now available, together with the memoirs of
politicians, diplomats, military men, and journalists, it is possible
to write a dispassionate and accurate account of European diplomacy
from the murder of Archduke Francis Ferdinand and his wife at Sarajevo
on June 28, 1914, to the outbreak of the general European war in August.
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