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"It is impossible that matters will not be settled," Jaurès told a Belgian socialist leader the next morning. "Come, I have a few hours before my train. Let's go to the Museum and see the Flemish primitives." Once back in Paris, Jaurès hurried to the Chamber of Deputies to lobby his fellow legislators against war. The French socialists were encouraged when a special envoy from their sister party in Germany rushed to Paris to assure them that the socialist bloc in the German parliament would vote against the war credits the Kaiser was about to ask for. If socialists in France and Germany worked together, could not the conflict be prevented?

Events outraced them. "The sword is being forced into my hand," Kaiser Wilhelm II declared on July 31. Playing the role of the aggrieved victim of Russia's mobilization, he promptly ordered Germany's own first steps in the process. (Tsar Nicholas II would use similar words a few days later: "I have done all in my power to avert war. Now ... it has been forced on me.") Britain then asked both France and Germany for guarantees that they would honor Belgian neutrality. France said yes within the hour. Germany did not reply.

That night, returning home from dinner, Hardie found a crowd of journalists gathered outside his London flat. They had terrible news from Paris: a fanatical young nationalist had fired two shots into Jean Jaurès as he was dining with some comrades at the Café Croissant on the Rue Montmartre. Slumped across the table, he was dead within minutes. Crowds swept toward the restaurant in such numbers that it took the police a quarter of an hour to clear the way for an ambulance. The French cabinet feared a working-class uprising might occur just as war was about to begin. Politicians who had had no use for Jaurès when he was alive rushed to comfort his widow and to proclaim to all that, at this moment of crisis, the great man surely would have called for national unity.

A German ultimatum to Russia demanding a halt to mobilization brought no answer. On August 1, Germany called up all troops; officers waving handkerchiefs and shouting "Mobilization!" stood in open-topped cars that raced through the streets of the capital. Outside the Kaiser's palace, crowds broke into a hymn of thanksgiving. That evening, Germany declared war on Russia. So eager were its officials that the German government had telegraphed its ambassador in St. Petersburg two declarations of war to be delivered to Russia's foreign minister: one if Russia did not reply to its ultimatum, the other rejecting the Russian reply as unsatisfactory. In his haste and confusion, the ambassador handed over both messages.

That same day, France began preparing for the German attack that clearly was inevitable. At a tea dance at the fashionable lakeside Pavillon d'Armenonville in the Bois de Boulogne, the manager halted the music, announced "Mobilization has been ordered," and asked the band to play "La Marseillaise." By evening, Paris restaurant orchestras were playing the British and Russian national anthems as well.

Across Europe, crowds pulsed with an eerie excitement that few people had experienced in their lifetime. "I must acknowledge that there was a majestic, rapturous, and even seductive something" in the air of Vienna, recalled the Austrian writer Stefan Zweig, a pacifist. "In spite of all my hatred and aversion for war, I should not like to have missed the memory of those first days.... All differences of class, rank, and language were swamped at that moment by the rushing feeling of fraternity. Strangers spoke to one another in the streets, people who had avoided each other for years shook hands, everywhere one saw excited faces. Each individual experienced an exaltation of his ego, he was no longer the isolated person of former times."

In Berlin, exuberant masses of well-dressed people, who expected the war to be finished quickly, surged along the boulevards. After all, in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–1871, victory had come in a matter of months. With motor transport and the vast expansion of railways,