Editing The World Wars (section)

===The Straw that Broke Europe's Back===
The spark that detonated the Balkans came in the form of the assassination of the heir to the Austrian throne, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, at the hands of Gavrilo Princip, a member of the Young Bosnia movement, which was itself under the influence of the Black Hand, an infamous Serbian nationalist organization. Austria-Hungary gave an ultimatum to Serbia (then the biggest independent Slavic country), which included some frankly ridiculous and cruel terms. When [[Just as Planned|the Serbs rejected a few of these terms, the Austrians took it as a casus belli]] and declared war on Serbia. This was the first in a line of dominoes. In response, [[Not as planned|Russia declared war on Austria, to which Germany declared war on Russia, to which France declared war on Germany]]. Germany would then invade neutral Belgium in an attempt to avoid French fortifications on the border, bringing the British into the conflict... at least on paper. In reality, after the fall of the Spanish Empire and weakening of France, England had acquired a near-monopoly on overseas trade and undisputed control of the seas, and it would have been perfectly content to let the continental powers beat the shit out of each other without getting involved...until Germany started churning out dreadnoughts of its own. As mentioned, the dreadnought arms race meant that Germany was threatening England's complete naval domination and thus the lifeblood of its empire. A frightened and suspicious Britain was champing at the bit for a throwdown, and Belgium was just the perfect excuse to get involved. 

The internationalization of the conflict and the various ethnicities that the colonial empires of Europe press-ganged into service had some downright comical results, like an Indian battalion fighting in East Africa against German-led Askari tribesmen and Maori soldiers killing Turks at Gallipoli, all because because a Serbian shot an Austrian in Bosnia.

Thus began a conflict that would last for four bloody years, see eleven million deaths as the result of horrific industrial warfare in the trenches and bombed-out fields, the outbreak of diseases such as the Spanish flu, and the breakup of several empires to form new nations. An entire generation of Europe's young men was destroyed as a result (commonly known as the [[Grimdark|Lost Generation]] today) and gave rise to later extremist philosophies, the proponents of whom were all too eager to amass power for themselves by blaming their nation's misfortunes on the subversive "other." And while the civilian losses were nowhere near that of the Second World War, they were significant on both fronts, especially in Belgium where the Imperial German Army exercised collective punishment against villages suspected of harboring partisans.