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This was the moment that Keir Hardie and his comrades had so long feared, and they hoped desperately that they could call on labor and socialist movements across the continent to reverse the drift toward war. These forces had grown remarkably strong. The number of socialist parliamentary deputies had been rising rapidly, not only in Germany, but in Italy, Belgium, and France. In the past five years, British trade union membership had nearly doubled, and for some time there had been talk of staging a general strike in November 1914. Russian workers were the most militant of all: 1,450,000 of them had gone on strike in the first seven months of the year; in St. Petersburg this July, strikers were smashing shop windows and, in one working-class district, had put up street barricades.

Hardie, who was now talking about the need for a "United States of Europe," had spent the early part of the year railing against war on a speaking tour of Britain. Besides his many supporters in the trade union movement, there was a wider circle of possible sympathizers as well, such as the network of Britons who, like him, had once opposed the Boer War. Even though his comrade in that struggle, Emmeline Pankhurst, had spurned male allies in her suffrage campaign, hadn't she also declared that the WSPU had no use for war? And Christabel, the daughter she was so close to, had, as recently as June, echoed her mother in an article in the organization's newspaper, referring to "men's wars" as "savage and cruel and violent" and "a horror unspeakable ... a mechanical and soulless massacre of multitudes of soldiers, mere boys some of them." Another opponent of the Boer War, David Lloyd George, was now in the cabinet as chancellor of the exchequer—and in public statements, even after the assassinations at Sarajevo, seemed to go out of his way to play down the possibility of war with Germany. Might this new crisis find all of them campaigning together once again?

At the end of July, Europe's socialist parties called an emergency meeting in Brussels at the Maison du Peuple, the headquarters of Belgium's trade unionists, whose café, theater, and cooperative shops hinted at the enlightened social order that united workers might soon bring into being. On a rainy day, their journeys slowed by railways newly clogged with mobilizing soldiers, Hardie came from Britain, Jaurès from France, the diminutive, chain-smoking Rosa Luxemburg from Germany, and more comrades from other countries. To Hardie's disappointment, not all endorsed his call for a general strike against the looming war. The delegates did, at least, approve an antiwar resolution, and called for a full emergency congress of the Second International in Paris ten days later. Jaurès would preside there; perhaps, Hardie hoped, with his great eloquence he could steer the delegates toward a general strike. He was known as a charismatic speaker no matter what he was talking about. "The walls of the room seemed to dissolve: we swam in the ether," wrote one listener after hearing Jaurès mesmerize a dinner party with a discourse on astronomy. "The women forgot to re-powder their faces, the men to smoke, the servants to go in search of their own supper."

Alarming the delegates, the news that Austria had declared war on Serbia arrived during the Brussels meeting—but so did dramatic proof of opposition to German militarism: a telegram from Berlin reporting an antiwar demonstration of 100,000 people on the Unter den Linden, the city's great boulevard. That evening Jaurès stood before a rally of Belgian workers with his arm around Hugo Haase, co-chair of the German Social Democrats—just the sort of public gesture that enraged ultranationalists in France. He spoke with all the passion of someone who had feared the coming of this moment his whole life; when he finished, the crowd of some 7,000 poured through the streets of Brussels, singing "The Internationale" and chanting "Guerre à la guerre!" (War on war!)