After the “Introduction,” “Part I” opens with a brutal regicide and coup that sees the king of Serbia and his queen ruthlessly murdered and immediately supplanted by a rival royal family, one far more antagonistic to their giant though somewhat wobbly neighbor, the Austro-Hungarian Habsburg Empire, a mammoth if somewhat archaic collection of nations and nationalities that dominates central Europe in sheer immensity if not political power. The author has divided Sleepwalkers into three distinct parts. So I started on Sleepwalkers, driven also by a kind of obligation to read it, despite its intimidating format and size, due to the context of how it came to me. I have read something of the causes of the conflict – most recently To End All Wars by Adam Hochschild and Europe’s Last Summer by David Fromkin – but I have much to learn. World War I – the “Great War” before they started numbering them – has only lately come to intrigue me, as it recedes ever deeper into the distant past and its centennial is upon us. I flipped through it while we chatted and at first blush it was indeed daunting: the trade paper edition he handed me was packed with 562 pages of dense, small type, not including the nearly 150 pages more of notes and index. “I tried but I couldn’t really get into it,” he confessed. With remarkable equanimity, he told me of his grim prospects while passing me the volume. I came to read The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914, by Christopher Clark, under somewhat unusual circumstances: it was pressed upon me by an elderly business client with similar historical interests, fresh from his very recent diagnosis with a terminal illness.
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