My second contribution for ABC New England to the increasingly inaccurately named series 'The road to war' was broadcast today, and is online here. Increasingly inaccurate because my topic today was the outbreak of war in August 1914 between Germany on the one hand and France and especially poor little Belgium on the other, including the Schlieffen Plan and German atrocities against Belgian civilians. I also talked about Plan XVII and the French occupation and then retreat from Mulhouse, which had been lost to the Germans in 1871. I also spoke in somewhat garbled fashion about the escape of the Goeben and the Breslau from the Royal Navy in the Mediterranean, and the Australian capture of the German merchant vessel Hobart in Port Phillip, which gained priceless naval codebooks for Allied intelligence; and not at all about Austro-Hungarian atrocities in Serbia, the Australian raid on Rabaul, or the British and French invasion of German Togoland. Because I ran overtime. At least I wasn't as croaky as last time!

Image source: Wikimedia.

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