Excerpt from How the War Began<br><br>Why Europe is at the present moment convulsed with war, and especially why we are dragged into the quarrel. If the man in the street merely refers back to alleged causes, to which we have already referred, his confusion only grows the greater. He readily understands that often, in the course of history, mountains are in labour, and, as the Roman poet said, only a ridiculous mouse is born. The contrary proposition is more difficult to understand - how an event occurring in Bosnia, even though it should be the murder of an Archduke, should put so many towering mountain ranges in labour. The first thing then that any student of contemporary events has to seek to comprehend is the wide scope of those underlying movements in Europe, which have at last come into such blazing prominence in the European war of 1914.<br><br>About the Publisher<br><br>Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com<br><br>This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.