World War I (abbreviated WWI), also known as the First World War, the Great War and "The War to End All Wars" was a global military conflict that took place mostly in Europe between 1914 and 1918. It was a total war which left millions dead and shaped the modern world.

With an excuse or an ‘incident’, one merely had to ignite this great and patiently amassed bonfire of pent-up hostility in the heart of Europe. What necessary for sparkling a war, is a timely ‘act of terror’ and a terrorist to effect it. It was rather easily found in the inconspicuous figure of a Serb student by the name of Gavrilo Princip.

The occasion? Sarajevo.

 

The First shoot

On June 28, 1914, the legitimate heir to the Hapsburg throne the nephew of Emperor Franz Joseph, Archduke Ferdinand and his consort Sophie duchess of Hohenburg descended on an official visit to the new province’s capital.

As a retaliatory act against Austria’s 1908 single-handed annexation of Bosnia- Herzegovina, which the Serbs had claimed for themselves, Cabrinovic, abetted by Grabez – two militants of a secret Pan- Serbian organisation suggestively called ‘The Black Hand’, whose motto was ‘Union or Death’- hurled a Bomb at the vehicle carrying their Royal Highnesses and missed.
The Bomb went off and wounded a few passers-by. The carriage moved on and the visit proceeded as scheduled. When the reception at the townhall came to an end, the Archduke and his wife boarded the car anew; suddenly Gavrilo Princip, the third oarty to the commando, came zwinging to the right side of the vehicle; as he fired at Ferdinand and his wife and killed both.

This was an instance of terrorism: namely, a deed of violence, which, at best, was devoid of any appreciable political gain or motive and at worst as it elicited a far bloodier reprisal was entirely deleterious to the terrorists themselves. An act of terror generally takes the form of a spectacular feat of devastation capable of rippling waves of public indignation and accordingly provides the adversarial factions with the pretext for commencing war. Recruiting terrorists never seems a problem: these appear at the basic level to be a lose collection of desperadoes, who end up being easily trained, provisioned and oriented by undercover intelligence services of the home country.
  
Thus, on the face of it, a senseless crime; in substance, a political gambit orchestrated elsewhere. Where? The covert role of Serbian intelligence in casting the three teenage students for the assassination was widely acknowledged but ‘the real director of the conspiracy had been Russia’s military Attache´ Colonel Victor Artamanov, who had told (the chiefs of Serb intelligence) in the early stages, ‘Go ahead. If attacked, you will not stand alone.’

Gavrilo Princip was the first of a long sequence of ‘patsies’, ‘pawns’ or ‘useful idiots’ whose individually unflattering but politically expeditious task is to bring to a head decisions matured beforehand by the Elder Statesman.

 

The ignition

Following the assassination, the Austro-Hungarian government, supported by their German allies, determined to punish those involved in the assassination, and on July 23 sent an ultimatum to the Serbs with demands which were rejected.
The Serbians, relying on the hope of support from Russia, gave an unacceptable response which led to Austrian rejection, and to a declaration of war against Austria and Germany on July 28.
The Russians mobilized in support of their Serbian allies. First, this was only partial mobilization, directed against only the Austrian frontier. On July 31, after the Russian high command told the emperor that this was logistically impossible, a general mobilization was ordered. The German war plan, which relied on a quick strike against the Russians' French allies while the Russian army slowly mobilized, could not afford to allow the Russians to begin mobilization without launching their attack on the west. As such, the Germans declared war against Russia on August 1 and against France two days later, immediately launching an invasion of Luxembourg and Belgium to get around the fortifications along the Franco-German border. This violation of Belgium's neutrality led to a British declaration of war on Germany on August 4. With this declaration, five of the six great European powers became involved in the first European general war since the Napoleonic Wars.

Although World War I was triggered by this chain of events unleashed by the assassination, the war's origins go deeper, involving national politics, cultures, economics, and a complex web of alliances and counterbalances that developed between the various European powers over the course of the nineteenth century, following the final 1815 defeat of Napoleon Bonaparte and the ensuing Congress of Vienna.
The reasons for the outbreak of World War I are a complicated issue; there are many factors that intertwine. Some examples are:

The various categories of explanation for World War I correspond to different historians' overall methodologies. Most historians and popular commentators include causes from more than one category of explanation to provide a rounded account of the causal circumstances behind the war. The deepest distinction among these accounts is that between stories which find it to have been the inevitable and predictable outcome of certain factors, and those which describe it as an arbitrary and unfortunate mistake.