The Fall of the Dynasties: The Collapse of the Old Order: 1905-1922

by Edmond Taylor

When the detonator finally went off, on July 23, the statesmen and the diplomats were only slightly less surprised than the novelist Elinor Glyn, then at the height of her slightly scandalous success, who commented with asperity on the bad manners of the Austrian Ambassador in rushing away from a weekend house party in a chateau near Paris at which they were fellow guests. Anthony Glyn relates in his entertaining biography of his famous grandmother that when Fielder, Elinor’s chauffeur, suggested the disappearance of the Ambassador was possibly a sign of impending war, “everyone searched hurriedly in the newspapers to see what he could mean and with whom the war could be.”