Explanatory factors which are often overlooked

Recently completed and very much enjoyed Erik Larson's Dead Wake. Page 27.

The dispute between Austria and Serbia could have ended there: a small war against a disruptive Balkan country. But within a week, the brush fire gusted into a firestorm, spiking fears, resurrecting animosities, triggering alliances and understandings, and setting long-laid plans in motion. On Tuesday, August 4, following the Schlieffen plan, German forces entered Belgium, dragging behind them giant fortress-busting guns capable of launching shells weighing 2,000 pounds apiece. Britain declared war, siding with Russia and France, the “Allies”; Germany and Austria-Hungary linked arms as the “Central Powers.” That same day, Wilson declared America to be neutral in an executive proclamation that barred the warships of Germany and Britain and all other belligerents from entering U.S. ports. Later, a week after his wife’s funeral, struggling against his personal grief to address the larger trauma of the world, Wilson told the nation, “We must be impartial in thought as well as in action, must put a curb upon our sentiments as well as upon every transaction that might be construed as a preference of one party to the struggle before another.”

I have read a fair amount of World War I history, including that wonderful mammoth exploration of the genesis and early days of the war, The Guns of August by Barbra Tuchman.

Perhaps it is a faulty memory, but my recollection of school day readings on the war rarely mentioned Wilson's personal trauma surrounding the death of his wife. It was only many books later that I began to notice it at all. Larson does a good job of giving that trauma a more appropriate weighting than usually occurs. I am not certain that his wife's death was necessarily determinative of any particular decision but I wonder to what extent his grief clouded his thinking, instincts and reactions in the early critical days of the war.