Intro: Relativity
In October 1914, ninety-three of Germany's most distinguished minds — Nobel laureates, painters, poets, chemists, physicists — signed their names to a document defending the invasion of Belgium and the conduct of the German army. The Manifesto of the Ninety-Three was meant to answer foreign outrage with the authority of German culture itself: these were not the words of generals, but of the men who had given the world aspirin and X-rays and the periodic table, insisting there had been no atrocities, no violation of neutrality, nothing but a nation defending itself. Max Planck signed it. So, eventually, did colleagues Albert Einstein had worked alongside for years.
Einstein did not. A Swiss citizen by choice, a pacifist by temperament, and by 1914 the director of a Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Berlin, he watched the signatures accumulate with something close to disgust, and he attached his own name instead to a countermanifesto that almost no one signed — three others, in the end, out of the whole of German academia. It went nowhere. It was barely published. But it marked, cleanly, the moment the old idea of science as a fellowship above nations came apart in Einstein's own hands. He would spend the next two years working largely alone, in a Germany at war with most of the physicists he might otherwise have corresponded with, trying to finish something he had started nearly a decade earlier.
What he was finishing was an argument that space and time were not the fixed stage on which events occurred, but a substance that bent under the weight of matter — that a beam of starlight would visibly curve as it passed the sun, that a clock in a strong gravitational field would run slower than one far from it, that there was no single, universal "now" shared by every observer in the universe. He had laid out the field equations to the Prussian Academy in November 1915. By the following March he had finished the long, comprehensive paper that explained them properly, and in May 1916 it appeared in the Annalen der Physik under a title that made no claims for itself beyond description: The Foundation of the General Theory of Relativity. Newton's universe, fixed and absolute since the seventeenth century, was quietly, technically, no longer true.
It should not have reached anyone outside Germany at all. Wartime censorship and severed academic ties meant German science mostly stopped crossing into enemy territory in 1916 — but it kept flowing to neutral countries, and the Netherlands was full of physicists who talked to everyone. Einstein's friends in Leiden — Hendrik Lorentz, Paul Ehrenfest, Willem de Sitter — read the paper as it came out and understood immediately what it was. De Sitter wrote up a long explanation of it for the Royal Astronomical Society in London, ninety pages across three papers, and the man who received them and saw them into print was Arthur Eddington: a British astronomer, in a country at war with Germany, quietly ushering a German physicist's theory of the universe into English in the middle of the war that was supposed to have made such things impossible. Three years later, Eddington would take the theory to a solar eclipse and confirm it against starlight. In 1916, all that mattered was that it had gotten through at all — smuggled past a war that could stop armies from crossing the Rhine but not, it turned out, an idea moving through a neutral country's mail.
The theory said something the year hardly needed spelling out. There was no fixed frame from which to judge events, no absolute vantage from which the war made sense. Everything was relative to where you stood — and after four years of watching the old order of Europe justify itself in the same breath as it destroyed the young men meant to inherit it, that was not a hard idea to accept. The dynasties, the treaties, the whole edifice of who owed loyalty to whom, all of it had seemed as fixed as Newton's universe in the summer of 1914. It would not survive 1916 intact either. Somewhere in Berlin, a man nobody had asked to fight was quietly proving that nothing was as fixed as it looked.
Part I: Verdun
In his memoirs, Erich von Falkenhayn describes handing the Kaiser a memorandum just before Christmas 1915, laying out with cold precision how Germany would win the war in the coming year: not by breaking through the Western Front, which he judged impossible, but by selecting a target the French could not afford to lose and grinding their army to pieces in its defense. France, he wrote, was already close to the limit of what she could bear. One more push, sustained long enough, would bleed her white. The document has never been found. No one but Falkenhayn ever claimed to have seen it, and historians remain divided on whether it existed in the form he described or whether he invented it after the fact, once the battle he was about to unleash had failed to do anything so tidy as bleed anyone white in particular. What is not in dispute is the target he chose: Verdun, an ancient fortress town on the Meuse that meant comparatively little to France's actual defense and almost everything to her pride.
The attack opened on February 21, 1916, after a ten-hour bombardment so dense that French soldiers said the earth itself seemed to be dying. Within four days the Germans had taken Fort Douaumont, the anchor of Verdun's ring of defenses, virtually without a fight — a detachment of German infantry walked in and found it nearly empty, its garrison stripped away months earlier to reinforce other sectors. It was the kind of shock that could have ended the battle in Germany's favor within the week. Instead it triggered the opposite: Joseph Joffre rushed Philippe Pétain and the Second Army to Verdun, and France committed itself, absolutely, to a fight for a fortress that was more symbolic than strategic.
Pétain's contribution to the battle was almost entirely a matter of logistics and mercy, in roughly equal measure. Verdun had one road running to it that had not been cut by the fighting, a narrow departmental route from Bar-le-Duc, and Pétain turned it into a conveyor belt: trucks passing every fourteen seconds, day and night, gravel crews filling the ruts behind them as fast as they opened. Within months it was carrying 90,000 men and 50,000 tons of material a week and had earned its wartime name, the Voie Sacrée — the Sacred Way. Alongside it he instituted the noria system, cycling divisions in and out of the line every couple of weeks rather than leaving them to be consumed entirely. It was not gentle — soldiers rotated through Verdun again and again over the months, so that eventually seventy of France's ninety-five divisions passed through what the men themselves called the mill on the Meuse — but it meant an army bled slowly enough to keep bleeding, rather than dying outright in the first weeks the way Falkenhayn had hoped.
The fighting through the spring and summer took on a character that stopped resembling strategy in any recognizable sense. At Fort Vaux, Major Sylvain-Eugène Raynal held out for nearly a week with a garrison of a few hundred men and no water, communicating by carrier pigeon until the birds ran out too, before surrendering on June 7; the German Crown Prince, commanding the opposing force, was sufficiently moved by the defense to present Raynal with a sword. Two weeks later the Germans introduced diphosgene gas to the battle, shelling French positions before an assault that finally reached Fort Souville, the last defensive line before Verdun itself — and there, in early July, the German advance stopped for good, in part because German divisions were being pulled east and west: to reinforce against a Russian offensive tearing through Austria-Hungary, and to meet a new British and French push that had just opened on the Somme, sixty miles to the northwest, explicitly to take the pressure off Verdun.
Pétain himself did not see the battle through. In late April he was promoted upward, to command of an army group, a promotion that removed him from direct control just as the fighting reached its worst; his caution had made the high command uneasy, and his replacement, Robert Nivelle, arrived with a taste for the offensive that Pétain had never shared. It was Nivelle, not Pétain, who produced the phrase that would outlive both of them — an order of the day in June, as Fleury changed hands for perhaps the tenth time, telling his men simply that the Germans would not pass. Ils ne passeront pas. Popular memory has attached the line to Pétain almost from the start, the Lion of Verdun's words by acclamation if not by fact, and the record has never quite managed to correct it.
Nivelle got his offensive in October, using the same creeping artillery barrage the Canadians had tested at the Somme weeks before, and retook Douaumont in a single day — the fort Germany had captured almost by accident in February, recaptured by France almost as easily eight months and hundreds of thousands of lives later. Fort Vaux followed in November. By December 18, when the fighting finally stopped, the front line ran almost exactly where it had in February. Ten months, something over seven hundred thousand casualties between both armies, and the map had barely moved. Falkenhayn was gone by then too, dismissed in August and sent to command on the Romanian front, replaced at German headquarters by Hindenburg and Ludendorff — the men who would run the war for its remaining two years, and who inherited a Western Front that had just demonstrated, at unbearable cost, that bleeding an enemy white was not a strategy so much as an admission that no other kind of victory was available anymore.
Part II: Easter
Meanwhile, in Ireland, a small cadre of rebels hoped the war would create a distraction that would further their own goals. The rising had its roots in a promise that kept receding. Home Rule — a limited form of Irish self-government, well short of full independence — had cleared the British Parliament in September 1914 after decades of nationalist agitation, only to be suspended for the war's duration before it ever took effect. Ulster unionists had already armed themselves against the prospect of it, forming the Ulster Volunteers and smuggling in German rifles in 1914; southern nationalists had answered in kind, forming the Irish Volunteers that same year. Most constitutional nationalists, following John Redmond, were prepared to wait out the war and take Home Rule when it came. The Irish Republican Brotherhood, a secretive organization with roots in the nineteenth-century Fenian movement, was not. Its military council — Pearse among them, alongside Clarke, Connolly, and others, working in near-total secrecy even from their own Volunteer movement's official leadership — wanted an independent republic outright, and had concluded that Britain's distraction with the war in Europe was the opportunity that decades of patience had failed to produce. Pearse in particular had come to believe, in his writing well before 1916, that Ireland needed a blood sacrifice: a rising that would fail militarily almost by design, on the theory that martyred rebels would accomplish what argument and patience could not. It was less a plan to defeat the British Army in Dublin than a bet that losing, publicly and violently enough, would finally move Irish opinion somewhere Home Rule never could.
The plan depended on a German arms shipment that never made it ashore. Twenty thousand rifles were sailing for the Kerry coast aboard a disguised German freighter called the Aud, timed to land on Good Friday — a full day before anyone was expecting it, thanks to a communication failure, so no one was waiting when it arrived. The Royal Navy had been tracking it the whole way. Intercepted off Tralee Bay, the Aud's captain scuttled his own ship rather than let the cargo be taken intact. Roger Casement, the Irish nationalist who had arranged the shipment from Germany and who had in fact soured on the rising's chances and returned home partly hoping to stop it, came ashore separately from a German U-boat and was arrested within hours on Banna Strand. Eoin MacNeill, the Irish Volunteers' chief of staff, had only half-believed the rising was happening at all; when word of Casement's capture reached him, he printed a countermanding order in the Sunday papers cancelling the Volunteers' Easter maneuvers outright. The rebellion that had been designed as a nationwide rising, coordinated with a foreign landing, arrived at its first morning already reduced to Dublin alone, and short several thousand men who read the newspaper and stayed home.
It happened anyway. On Easter Monday, April 24, roughly 1,200 members of the Irish Volunteers and James Connolly's smaller Irish Citizen Army seized a handful of buildings around Dublin's city center, the General Post Office chief among them. Patrick Pearse stepped outside and read a proclamation of an Irish Republic to a crowd of bystanders who mostly seemed confused about what they were watching. Green, white, and orange flags went up over the GPO alongside a second flag bearing a golden harp. Inside, seven men who had signed that proclamation — Pearse, Clarke, Connolly, MacDiarmada, MacDonagh, Ceannt, Plunkett — settled in to hold a post office against the largest army in the world.
They held longer than anyone had reason to expect, and it did not matter. British reinforcements arrived within days — ten thousand troops by midweek, twenty thousand before it ended — along with artillery and a gunboat on the Liffey that shelled rebel positions directly. Sackville Street burned through Thursday and Friday, the fires spreading faster than either side could fight the war around them. Connolly was hit twice, the second time badly enough to shatter his ankle; command passed effectively to Pearse, who by Friday evening was directing a defense from a building that was actively on fire. They tunneled through party walls to a shopfront on Moore Street to escape the flames, and there, on Saturday, April 29, with civilians dying in the crossfire and no path left that didn't cost more of them, Pearse surrendered unconditionally. Six days, roughly 450 dead — most of them civilians — and a rebellion that had failed by essentially every military measure available to it.
Dublin's own reaction to that failure was not sympathy. Many of the men marched to prison were jeered along the route, spat at in places, particularly in the working-class districts that had sent the most sons to fight in France and Flanders; the rising had gutted the city center and interrupted a war effort plenty of Dubliners still believed in. Nationalist politicians were quick to distance themselves from it. John Redmond, leader of the Irish Parliamentary Party, called it a German plot dressed up as a rebellion, and for a week or two that reading held.
Then the executions began. Sixteen men were tried in secret courts-martial and shot at Kilmainham Gaol between May 3 and May 12 — the seven signatories among them, plus others tried alongside them, one execution most mornings, spread out just long enough for each fresh name to make its own headline. James Connolly, still unable to stand from his wound, was carried to the execution yard on a stretcher and shot tied to a chair. Roger Casement was hanged separately in London that August, tried for treason in a case the prosecution supplemented, unofficially, by circulating diary passages documenting his sexual relationships with men — not evidence of the charge against him, but material calculated to cost him the sympathy his death sentence might otherwise have drawn. What had looked, in the week of the fighting, like a reckless and even embarrassing episode, began by early May to look like something else: not a coup that had failed, but a sacrifice that had succeeded on its own terms. Herbert Asquith's government had taken men most of Dublin considered fools and, one firing squad at a time, made them impossible to think of as anything but martyrs.
Part III: Jutland
Following the attack on the Lusitania, the naval aspect of the war took on heightened significance. The British had one advantage the Germans never knew about: Room 40, the Admiralty's codebreaking section, had been reading German naval signals for the better part of a year. When Admiral Reinhard Scheer took the High Seas Fleet to sea on May 30 hoping to lure out and isolate a portion of the Royal Navy's Grand Fleet, the British were already moving to meet him, forewarned before his own scouting forces had even engaged. It should have been a trap sprung on the trapper. Instead it produced, over the following two days, the largest and last fleet action of dreadnought battleships in history — two enormous steel armies of the sea maneuvering toward each other in the fog and smoke of the North Sea, and neither one landing the single knockout blow both sides had spent a decade and a king's ransom preparing for.
The opening hour belonged entirely to Germany. Vice-Admiral David Beatty's battlecruisers engaged Admiral Franz Hipper's scouting group in what became known as the Run to the South, and within minutes HMS Indefatigable took a salvo from the Von der Tann, broke apart, and sank with all but two of her crew of roughly a thousand men. Twenty-four minutes later HMS Queen Mary followed her, hit by four shells that reached her magazines; she broke in half so fast that the ships behind her in line nearly collided with the wreckage as it went down. Only twenty of her twelve hundred crew survived. Watching from the bridge of his flagship, Beatty turned to his flag captain with a line that would outlive the battle itself: there seemed to be something wrong with their bloody ships today. He was closer to the truth than he wanted to be — British battlecruisers were carrying propellant charges through open magazine doors to speed up their rate of fire, a practice that had made them faster in gunnery duels and now, in the space of half an hour, had made two of them into tombs.
Beatty turned north to draw the Germans toward Jellicoe's main fleet, and it worked exactly as intended. When the two full battle lines finally met in the evening, Jellicoe managed to cross Scheer's T not once but twice — positioning his ships so the entire British line could fire while only the lead German ships could answer — and for a few minutes the High Seas Fleet took a battering that could have ended it. Both times Scheer executed a battle turn away, a maneuver that reversed his whole fleet's course simultaneously and pulled it out of the trap before it closed, and both times he escaped into the smoke and failing light. A third British battlecruiser, HMS Invincible, was lost in the same manner as the first two that evening. Overnight, in a series of chaotic, close-range clashes that neither commander fully controlled, Scheer's fleet slipped past the rear of the British line and made it home to German harbors, leaving Jellicoe to learn only at dawn that the enemy he'd spent the night trying to trap was already gone.
By the numbers, Germany had won: fourteen British ships sunk against eleven German, and roughly 6,000 British dead against something over 2,500 German. German newspapers announced a new Trafalgar, reversed. British ones, expecting the crushing victory a fleet twice the size of its opponent's was supposed to deliver, ran headlines about heavy losses and let the disappointment show. Both readings missed the point in the same way. The High Seas Fleet had survived its one great test and inflicted painful losses doing it, but it went home to Wilhelmshaven and, for all practical purposes, never came out again in force for the rest of the war. Britain kept its blockade, kept its command of the sea lanes that fed the empire and starved Germany's, and lost nothing that new construction couldn't replace within the year. Scheer drew the only conclusion left to him: if the surface fleet couldn't break Britain's grip on the ocean, Germany would try to do it from underneath, with submarines, targeting merchant shipping without warning — a decision that would, within a year, help pull the United States into the war Germany could no longer win at sea in the open.
Part IV: Arab Uprising
Sharif Hussein bin Ali, the Hashemite guardian of Mecca, had spent the better part of a year negotiating in secret with Britain's high commissioner in Egypt before he committed to anything. Between July 1915 and March 1916, ten letters passed between Hussein and Sir Henry McMahon, in which McMahon pledged, on Britain's behalf, to recognize and support an independent Arab state stretching from Aleppo to Aden if Hussein rose against the Ottomans — a state that would, notably, exclude certain coastal areas McMahon left carefully vague. Hussein had his own reasons to move quickly: word had reached him that the Ottoman government was considering deposing him in favor of a rival, and Ottoman authorities had already hanged a string of Arab nationalist leaders in Damascus as a warning to anyone else entertaining similar ideas. Convinced enough by McMahon's letters and unwilling to wait and find out what came next, Hussein made his decision.
What he did not know — what almost no one outside a small circle in London and Paris knew — was that Britain had spent that same winter negotiating an entirely different map with France. The Sykes-Picot Agreement, worked out between British diplomat Mark Sykes and French diplomat François Georges-Picot from November 1915 and settled in principle by January 1916, carved the postwar Ottoman Middle East into British and French zones of control, with no particular regard for the independent Arab kingdom McMahon had just finished promising. The agreement was secret. Hussein would not learn its terms until the Bolsheviks published it from the captured Russian archives the following year, alongside Britain's separate 1917 pledge of a Jewish homeland in Palestine — three incompatible promises made to three different parties about the same land, all before the war that would decide its fate was even half over.
Hussein moved in June. On the fifth, his sons Ali and Faisal attacked the Ottoman garrison at Medina and were driven back by a stubborn defense under Fakhri Pasha that would hold the city under siege for the rest of the war and beyond — Medina did not surrender until January 1919, months after the armistice. Five days later, on June 10, Hussein fired a single shot from a window of his palace in Mecca, the agreed signal, and several thousand of his tribesmen opened fire on the Ottoman garrison below. The fighting stretched into July, street by street, and turned genuinely ugly when Ottoman gunners, trying to hold the high ground, began shelling the city indiscriminately — including, in one strike, the Kaaba itself, setting fire to the cloth covering Islam's holiest site. It was a battlefield accident with tremendous propaganda value, and Hussein's forces made full use of it: proof, they said, that the Ottomans no longer deserved to call their war a defense of Islam. Mecca fell to the Arab side on July 9, with British artillery support doing much of the work the tribesmen's rifles couldn't.
By autumn the revolt had taken most of the Red Sea ports, Jeddah and Yanbu and Rabigh among them, with the Royal Navy providing gunfire support from offshore and seaplanes overhead. Hussein declared himself King of the Arabs, a title the British recognized only as King of the Hejaz — a small, telling downgrade. In October, the British Cairo intelligence office sent a young officer named T. E. Lawrence to assess whether the revolt was worth reinforcing with regular troops. He arrived to find Faisal's camp demoralized and the whole enterprise close to stalling, and concluded that what the Arabs needed wasn't British soldiers but British gold, guns, and a guerrilla campaign built around the one advantage they actually had over the Ottomans: they could move through the desert faster than any conventional army could chase them. It was the beginning of the partnership that would make Lawrence famous and the revolt itself, eventually, victorious — fighting, without knowing it yet, for a version of independence that the men funding them had already signed away twice over.
Part V: The Somme
The offensive was never supposed to start on July 1, and it was never supposed to look the way it looked. The original Anglo-French plan, worked out between Douglas Haig and Joseph Joffre through the winter, called for a joint attack on the Somme in August, with French divisions bearing most of the weight and the British providing support. Verdun changed the arithmetic. As Falkenhayn's offensive bled the French army through the spring, Joffre needed the British to attack sooner and alone, if necessary, simply to pull German divisions off the Meuse. Haig obliged, moving the date forward to July 1 and taking on a larger share of the front than originally planned, on a stretch of country the British Army had never fought over and the Germans had spent two quiet years fortifying into some of the most heavily defended trench systems on the Western Front.
The plan rested on a week-long bombardment: 1.5 million shells fired over seven days, meant to cut the German wire and pulverize the defenders so completely that the infantry could simply walk across no-man's-land and occupy what was left. At 7:20 on the morning of July 1, engineers detonated a series of mines beneath the German lines, the largest of them at La Boisselle — the Lochnagar mine, which threw earth hundreds of feet into the air and left a crater still visible on the battlefield a century later. Ten minutes after that, the infantry went over the top, in many places walking, in evenly spaced lines, exactly as ordered, because commanders had assumed there would be nothing left alive to shoot at them.
There was. The week of shelling had left the German wire largely intact in long stretches and had done almost nothing to the deep concrete dugouts where the defenders had simply waited it out, thirty and forty feet underground. When the barrage lifted, German machine gun crews had time to climb back up, set their guns, and open fire on troops crossing open ground with nothing to hide behind. Many of the British soldiers walking into that fire were volunteers who had enlisted together in 1914 and 1915 under a recruiting scheme that let friends, neighbors, and coworkers serve side by side in so-called Pals battalions — a policy built for morale that turned into a mechanism for concentrating grief. The Accrington Pals lost 585 of the roughly 720 men who went forward, in under half an hour. The Sheffield City Battalion lost nearly 500 men on the same morning. The Newfoundland Regiment, attacking at Beaumont-Hamel, was all but wiped out: 710 casualties out of 790 men, most of them before they'd gone a hundred yards. By the end of the day the British Army had suffered close to 57,000 casualties, over 19,000 of them dead — the worst single day in its history, before or since, at a rate that has been calculated at one man killed roughly every four and a half seconds. The French, attacking to the south with less fanfare and better artillery coordination, actually met most of their objectives that day. It made no difference to how July 1 would be remembered.
What followed was not a second catastrophe but a long, grinding one, spread out instead of concentrated. Haig abandoned hope of the rapid breakthrough to Bapaume he'd planned for and settled into a battle of limited objectives and attrition — villages and ridgelines taken a few hundred yards at a time, at a cost that rarely justified the ground gained. On September 15, at Flers-Courcelette, the British introduced a genuinely new weapon to the war: forty-nine Mark I tanks, of which only thirty-two reached the starting line and eighteen made it into action at all, the rest breaking down or ditching in the cratered ground before firing a shot. It was, by any reasonable military standard, a premature and badly managed debut — Churchill, who had championed the tank's development, complained that his "land battleships" had been let off prematurely on a petty scale — but the sight of them was enough to unsettle German defenders who had never seen anything like it, and enough to convince Haig to order a thousand more built. Among the dead in that same attack was Raymond Asquith, son of the sitting British prime minister, one name among the tens of thousands that made the war's cost impossible to keep at the usual polite distance from the people making policy about it.
The battle ran on into the autumn rains, through October and into November, the ground turning to a kind of mud that swallowed men and equipment and made even modest advances a matter of days rather than hours. Haig finally called it off on November 18. In four and a half months the British and French had advanced roughly seven miles along a front of about the same width. The British Empire had suffered around 420,000 casualties; the French, still fighting their own battle at Verdun the entire time, another 200,000; German losses ran somewhere above 450,000, by some counts higher than the Allied total, though the accounting has never fully settled. More than three million men had fought there in total, and something over a million of them had been killed or wounded, for a change in the map that would have taken an afternoon to walk across before the shooting started. What the Somme actually accomplished, if that is the right word, was harder to see from inside 1916 than it would become later: German divisions pulled from Verdun to hold the line here, a war of attrition that ground down an already strained German army as much as it did the British and French, and a hard, expensive education in how to fight this kind of war that the British Army would carry, at a cost no one could yet calculate, into the campaigns still to come.
Coda: The Old World Withers
By the autumn of 1916 the empire the war had supposedly been fought to preserve was falling apart in three directions at once, and almost none of it was happening on a battlefield anyone in Vienna could point to as decisive. It started, in the sense that these things start anywhere, on June 4, when the Russian general Aleksei Brusilov opened an offensive against the Austro-Hungarian lines in Galicia with a brief, precisely targeted bombardment instead of the usual days-long barrage that gave defenders time to prepare. It worked exactly as he'd hoped. The Austro-Hungarian Fourth Army, holding the line near Lutsk, simply came apart — entire units surrendered en masse, many of them Slavic conscripts from within the empire's own borders who had little enthusiasm left for dying under a German-speaking high command they'd never much trusted to begin with. Within days the Russians had taken well over a hundred thousand prisoners. By the time the offensive wound down in September, Austria-Hungary had suffered somewhere near a million and a half casualties and lost more than twenty divisions as effective fighting forces — losses the empire had no way to replace and no illusions left about surviving without German help.
That help came at a price that amounted, in practical terms, to the loss of Austro-Hungarian independence. By September, German officers had taken direct command of the shattered eastern front the Austrians could no longer hold on their own; from that point forward the war the Dual Monarchy fought was one directed substantially from Berlin. A great power that had entered the war determined to punish Serbia for an assassination and reassert its authority over its own restless minorities was, less than two years later, a junior partner in its own military — a fact its Slavic subjects, watching their own conscripted countrymen surrender by the tens of thousands, understood with a clarity Vienna could no longer paper over.
Brusilov's success produced one more casualty almost immediately, though it took a while to become clear which side it belonged to. Watching Austria-Hungary buckle, Romania's government decided the moment had finally come to claim Transylvania, the ethnically Romanian territory still held by the Habsburgs, and declared war on Austria-Hungary on August 27. It was a catastrophic miscalculation dressed up as opportunism. Within four days Germany, the Ottoman Empire, and Bulgaria had all declared war on Romania in turn, and Erich von Falkenhayn — dismissed from the German high command that same week, in the wreckage of his failed Verdun strategy — was handed command of the counteroffensive against the country that had just tried to pick off his weakened ally. Romanian forces, poorly trained for the mountain fighting they'd chosen and expecting an empire too broken to resist, were driven back across Transylvania and then out of most of their own territory before the year was out. A country that entered the war hoping to profit from an empire's collapse ended it losing its own capital instead.
And in the middle of all of it, on November 21, the man who had held the whole contradictory architecture together simply by outlasting everyone died. Franz Joseph had been emperor for sixty-eight years — longer than most of his subjects had been alive, long enough that an entire vocabulary of jokes and affection and quiet exasperation had grown up around his rigid daily habits, his refusal to modernize anything that didn't strictly require it, his personal tragedies absorbed one by one without any visible change in the schedule. He caught a chill walking in the palace gardens, developed pneumonia, and was gone within days; his last recorded words, to his valet the evening before he died, were instructions about what time to wake him the next morning. He had told his advisers, back in 1914, that if the monarchy had to perish, it should at least perish decently. It did not get the chance to test that ambition under his own watch — he died believing, or at least insisting he believed, that the empire he'd spent nearly seven decades holding together by sheer bureaucratic persistence would somehow still be standing when the guns finally stopped. His grandnephew Charles inherited a throne attached to an army that no longer took its own orders, a Balkan front collapsing in on itself, and a multiethnic patchwork of Czechs and Poles and Croats and Serbs who had just watched entire regiments of their own countrymen surrender rather than keep dying for a crown none of them had chosen. The war Franz Joseph had approved to punish one small insult to Habsburg honor had, within two years, dissolved the very thing it was supposed to be defending — and he did not live to see how completely, though by November there could not have been much doubt left about where it was heading.