For Serbia, then, her entrance into The Balkan League in 1912 was a
natural sequence of many of her previous aspirations and efforts. In
presence of a common danger--the Teuton working through the Turk--the
Balkan States put aside their own particular rivalries and formed a
Union. This was effective, and the Turks were defeated. But when Turkey
was defeated, Bulgaria and Serbia were again at sword's points. It was
not a question of jealousies between small kingdoms, but rather a larger
issue--Pan-Slavism as against Pan-Teutonism. Serbs, wherever found, were
outspoken, and Austria saw that she might have to give up not only her
hope of adding Serbia to her dominions but besides this lose her
dominion over the Serbs within the dual monarchy. From that time she
hardly tried to hide her intention of punishing Serbia for her ambition.
Serbia, meanwhile, was growing bolder, stronger. Though her successes in
recent wars had not given her her coveted seaport, she had found ways of
getting a considerable proportion of her products to market without
sending them through Austria. Her imports from Austria fell off largely.
Austria and Germany saw that they would have difficulty in making Serbia
a docile ward, especially as M. Pachich in 1912 had made it plain to the
other Powers that it would be to their advantage to give Serbia a chance
to expand.
It was eleven years almost to a day from the time he came to the throne,
when Peter's security was shattered by an explosion. The Archduke
Ferdinand, heir to the Austrian throne, and his wife, while making a
tour through Bosnia, were killed at Sarajevo by a Serb, not one of the
kingdom of Serbia but a Serb of Greater Serbia. Austria, that had been
for so long watching Serbia as a cat watches a mouse, quickly pounced on
the little kingdom. She made demands such as no civilized country could
comply with, and at last gave an ultimatum on the twenty-seventh of July
which had far-reaching consequences. It was a stone thrown into a quiet
pool and the ripples and eddies reached unthought-of shores, as the
whole world now knows.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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