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The assassination of Austrian archduke Ferdinand in the Balkans in June 1914 led to much international comment throughout July and war became virtually inevitable by August, arriving at the height of a summer in which, for the British, there had been greater fears of a conflict in Ireland than in Europe. Mobilisation evoked a sense of patriotism in most of the confrontational nations (Germany and Austria-Hungary being the key powers on one side; France, Russia and Britain the principals on the other), which made them all believe they had a good cause for going to war with one another. In the east Russia lumbered towards Germany but was stopped decisively at Tannenberg. In the west France launched her armies with much elan and dash at her former territories of Alsace-Lorraine, only to be thrown back with huge losses. Britain called for volunteers to reinforce Expeditionary Force which was swiftly despatched to the nearest appropriate scene of action: Belgium (whose neutrality had been violated by the Germans) and northern France. There, after some months of high-casualty encounters of which the last and most bloody was the First Battle of Ypres in October-November, a stalemate ensued which was to continue for almost four years. The power of twentieth-century artillery forced the armies to dig in; the machine-gun and the rifle made `over-the-top' attacks highly costly. For Britain and France the `Western Front' - as it soon came to be known - was to be, as it were, the central stage of the war. Britain, the world's maritime superpower, had expected that the Navy, would play a decisive role, and indeed it did so up to a point but not in the manner expected, in that the battleship was to prove less important than the submarine and blockade was to prove a more effective weapon than the broadside.
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