It was in 1914 that much of Europe was dragged into war for the first time in almost a century (what wars there had been in the interim had been more localised in nature) but it was the culmination of a series of crises in the early years of the twentieth century. The first of these, the crisis of 1905/6 sparked by Kaiser Wilhelm’s manoeuvrings in Morocco which the French regarded as under their sphere of influence, suddenly gets recalled in today’s paper, as a French senator recalls his nation’s unpreparedness to fight – page 11.