The Cambridge History of Warfare

In his remarkable study, The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914, Christopher Clark noted the ‘unfortunate configuration of personalities’ in charge of Europe's destinies in 1914, and compared them with ‘a Harold Pinter play where the characters know each other very well and like each other very little’. The loquacious and indiscreet Kaiser visited his cousins, George V and Nicholas II, on several occasions, lionizing them in person and denigrating them in their absence. Franz Ferdinand circumnavigated the world in 1892–3, visiting Japan (just as Nicholas II would do a few years later), and a few months before his death he stayed with both George V and the Kaiser; but in private he was rude about them (and indeed about almost everyone else he met).