of England.

Notes:

[Footnote 22: Count Aehrenthal, foreign minister of Austria (1906-1912),
started the scheme of the Novi Bazar railway to connect the railways of
Bosnia with the (then) Turkish line to Salonica. See also
_Correspondence_, No. 19, Sir R. Rodd to Sir E. Grey, July 25: 'There is
reliable information that Austria intends to seize the Salonica
railway.']

[Footnote 23: For a summary of so-called proofs, see Appendix IV,
_infra_.]

[Footnote 24: _Camb. Mod. Hist_. xii. 379.]

CHAPTER IV

CHRONOLOGICAL SKETCH OF THE CRISIS

The following sketch of events from June 28 to August 4, 1914, is merely
intended as an introduction to the analytical and far more detailed
account of the negotiations and declarations of those days which the
reader will find below (Chap. V). Here we confine the narrative to a
plain statement of the successive stages in the crisis, neither
discussing the motives of the several Powers involved, nor
distinguishing the fine shades of difference in the various proposals
which were made by would-be mediators.

The crisis of 1914 began with an unforeseen development in the old
quarrel of Austria-Hungary and Russia over the Servian question. On June
28 the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir-apparent of the Austro-Hungarian
monarchy, and his wife, the Duchess of Hohenberg, paid a visit of
ceremony to the town of Serajevo, in Bosnia, the administrative centre
of the Austrian provinces of Bosnia and the Herzegovina. In entering the
town, the Archduke and the Duchess narrowly escaped being killed by a
bomb which was thrown at their carriage. Later in the day they were shot
by assassins armed with Browning pistols. The crime was apparently
planned by political conspirators who resented the Austrian annexation
of Bosnia and the Herzegovina (_supra_, p. 54), and who desired that
these provinces should be united to Servia.

The Austrian Government, having instituted an inquiry, came to the
conclusion that the bombs of the conspirators had been obtained from a
Servian arsenal; that the crime had been planned in Belgrade, the
Servian capital, with the help of a Servian staff-officer who provided
the pistols; that the criminals and their weapons had been conveyed from
Servia into Bosnia by officers of Servian frontier-posts and by Servian
customs-officials. At the moment the Austrian Government published no
proof of these conclusions,[25] but, on July 23, forwarded them to the
Servian Go