Not even Kaiser Wilhelm or Chancellor Bethmann Hollweg understood clearly at this point that Germany was literally incapable of mobilizing without invading its neighbors to the west and thereby igniting the continental war that all of them dreaded. The final tragedy is that the tsar’s decision was based largely on the things that Sazonov told him about Germany’s preparations for war, when in fact Germany remained the only one of the continental powers to have taken no military action at all.
Is this true?
