The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914

[Firn]

The Economics of WWI is a great series of VOX with some fascinating and little known and yet important aspects. It's quite accessible, too.

[davidbfpo]

Professor John Schindler has a blog piece on the first allied victory in WW1 @ Cer, a mountainous plateau in Serbia, which I expect have heard of:http://20committee.com/2014/08/19/10...f-world-war-i/

A taster:

The “brief autumn stroll” had ended in disaster. Vienna lost more than 23,000 soldiers killed, wounded, and missing in the brief campaign, winning nothing but an appreciation for Serbian tenacity and martial skill. Over four thousand Habsburg prisoners of war, forty-six artillery pieces, and thirty machine guns had been left in Serbian hands. Serbian casualties of 16,000 were considerable, but there was no mistaking that this had been an historic defeat for the House of Habsburg. The loss of prestige for the army and the monarchy was vast, and its diplomatic implications in the Balkans were frightening for Vienna.

A fascinating insight from an unexpected source:

Egon Erwin Kisch, a noted Prague journalist — he had broken the salacious story of the Redl spy scandal a year before — witnessed the retreat as a reserve NCO in a Czech regiment of VIII Corps, and he was shocked by how rapidly things had gone wrong: “a boisterous horde fleeing in thoughtless panic towards the border,” his shattered battalion led by a mere subaltern, its companies led by sergeants. “The army is defeated, on a lawless, wild, hasty retreat,” he lamented to his diary.