Mad Catastrophe

A Mad Catastrophe: The Outbreak of World War I and the Collapse of the Habsburg Empire by Geoffrey Wawro, 385 pages

In 1847, the Austrian Empire stood as the foundation of the European order and the arbiter of European destiny.  In 1848 that order was shaken, in 1866 Austria was humiliated in the Austro-Prussian War and excluded from wider German affairs, and a year later power within the Habsburg realms was divided between the German Austrians and the Hungarian Magyars.  By the second decade of the twentieth century Austria-Hungary was a dysfunctional state, a patchwork of rival linguistic and ethnic groups theoretically united by their shared allegiance to the Habsburg dynasty and its octogenarian patriarch, Emperor Franz Joseph.  It was this sick man of Europe that would stumble into beginning the First World War. 

Wawro's unrelenting cynicism occasionally becomes tiring - although there is certainly enough here to warrant cynicism - and at times petty, as when he sneers at Archduke Franz Ferdinand's insistence on visiting a man who had been wounded by an attack aimed at the Archduke, a decision that led him directly into the hands of his assassin.  Unfortunately, his constant denigration of his subjects on all sides of the war creates suspicion about the value of his judgement generally, which is a shame, since his Strangelovian tale of the follies of generals on the Eastern Front is otherwise a compelling examination of a largely forgotten part of World War I.