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‘It’s nothing,’ Franzi repeated. ‘It’s nothing.’ Both of them bled out quickly. When he heard that his unloved nephew was dead, Franz Josef, who had lost two wars and his brother, wife and son to violent deaths, just said, ‘One mustn’t defy the Almighty.’ Then he mused, ‘A superior power has restored that order which I unfortunately was unable to maintain.’ But how to react to Serbia?

‘Do you think we’d better cancel the race?’ Willy asked at the Kiel regatta. He rushed to Berlin just as, in Vienna, Franz Josef and General Conrad decided to attack Serbia and the old emperor wrote to Willy asking for support. ‘The Serbs need sorting out – and soon,’ wrote Willy. ‘Now or never.’ He immediately told the Austrians, ‘We mustn’t wait to take action.’ Indeed Franz Josef would regret it ‘if we don’t make use of the present moment’. Impulsive and incoherent, Wilhelm embodied the centre of German decision-making, assisted by Bethmann Hollweg and his neurotic chief of staff, Helmuth von Moltke the younger, who owed his position to his all-conquering uncle. At minimum, they envisioned the liquidation of Serbia; at maximum, a European war to defeat France via the adapted Schlieffen Plan, taking their empire and industrial regions, converting Belgium into a satellite state, breaking up Russia into principalities and establishing Germanic hegemony.

‘Military action against Serbia,’ Bethmann Hollweg reflected on 6 July, ‘could lead to world war.’ Although there were arguments about tactics during the exceedingly stressful weeks ahead, there was surprising agreement among the German leaders as well as among their Austrian counterparts that the opportunity must be taken, for honour – which we would now call credibility – but also for cold power. ‘It’ll be a hopeless struggle,’ Conrad confided in his mistress, ‘but it must be pursued because so old a monarchy and glorious an army can’t go down ingloriously.’ Even at the zenith of their military power and righteous superiority, empires are haunted by anxieties about fading potency and imminent decline. These empires were far past noon; it was dusk.

Wilhelm set off on his annual Norwegian cruise in order to provide a diplomatic alibi, telling Krupp, ‘This time I shan’t topple over.’ But in Austria Franz Josef waited at his Alpine schloss at Bad Ischl as ministers and generals in Vienna drafted a brutal ultimatum to Serbia, only to delay it when they realized that the French president Poincaré was in Petersburg visiting his ally Nicholas. They delayed the ultimatum until he was back at sea, a delay that made war more likely. On 23 July, the Habsburg ultimatum was delivered to Serbia, setting off a fatal sequence. In a complex diplomatic matrix conducted mainly by the toneless slow medium of the telegraph (and occasionally, for the first time in world affairs, by telephone), no statesman mastered the consequences or the multifaceted course of the unravelling crisis.

‘Ruthlessly and under all circumstances,’ Bethmann Hollweg told Wilhelm on 26 July, ‘Russia must be made into the source of injustice.’ Wilhelm hoped the Russians would blink, but instead Nicky prepared for war. Willy presumed the British would remain neutral, sending his brother Heinrich to see George V at Buckingham Palace. But British monarchs had no authority. On 25 July, Serbia rejected the ultimatum. On the 27th, the kaiser returned to Berlin and met with Bethmann Hollweg, who insisted on waiting for Russian mobilization because ‘We must appear to be the ones who are forced to go to war.’ On the 30th, Franz Josef declared war on Serbia, murmuring, ‘I can’t do anything else,’ and telling Conrad, ‘If we must perish, we should do so with honour.’ Nicholas ordered mobilization. Wilhelm telegraphed the tsar to appeal for restraint, dishonestly since he had insisted Austria attack Serbia.

‘Am glad you’re back,’ telegraphed Nicky. ‘An ignoble war has been declared on a weak country … I’ll be overwhelmed by pressure and forced to take measures that will lead to war. I beg you in the name of our old friendship to stop your allies …’

‘Russian military measures,’ Willy telegraphed, ‘would precipitate a calamity.’ Nicky asked Willy to mediate. Lifting a new-fangled invention, the telephone recently installed at the Peterhof Palace, Nicholas halted his mobilization – to the exasperation of his generals. But in one of his telegrams to Willy he stated that he had five days earlier started ‘military measures’ – a misstatement that underlines the importance of clear drafting and the dangers of personal diplomacy.

‘That’s almost a week ahead of us!’ cried Willy. ‘I can no longer involve myself in mediation …The tsar who was calling for it was secretly mobilizing behind my back. My task is finished!’ He added, ‘That means I’ve got to mobilize too.’ He demanded that Russia cease any such measures. The tsar, watching Austria mobilize, could not delay, and allowed his foreign minister to telephone the chief of staff to restart mobilization.