A mad Bosnian may have kicked the war off with the assassination of Franz Ferdinand in June, 1914, but events would escalate rather quickly for the Austro-Hungarians. I'm new to this subject, and the book assigned to me is a difficult read - but it appears that they increased their battle stance on two fronts, spread their troops too thinly, and things blew up from there. According to author Lew Strachan in his book, The First World War:
 | By the end of 1914 stalemate had therefore set in on both Austro-Hungary's fronts. It had effectively lost the Third Balkan War that it...had so ardently pursued. Within four months Austro-Hungary's casualties totalled 957,000, more than twice the army's pre-war strength. Things got ugly, as is wont in historical conflicts. Russia set about making its conquest permanent. Reactionaries saw Galacia as part of Russia, and persuaded the governor-general appointed to run it that it should be subject to Russification and racial cleansing. 'This meant that Russian was to be the only language in schools, that the churches should convert to Orthodoxy, and that the Russian army was licensed to loot. The ingrained anti-Semitism of the Russian army meant that Jews were driven from their homes either forward towards Austria-Hungary or back to the Russian interior. |
Along another border, Strachan claims, "Germany, for its part, concluded that it was "shackled to a corpse". It seems many players were sucked into a Balkan/World War because of a single assassination.
