to this terrible conflict? Who was responsible? . . . The nations slithered over the brink into the boiling cauldron of war without a trace of apprehension or dismay." Harry Elmer Barnes, an American scholar, reacted sharply to the Versailles verdict by blaming France and Russia for the outbreak of hostilities because of their motives:"The chief objects of Russian and French foreign policy, seizure of the Straits and the return of Alsace-Lorraine, could be realized only through a general European war.... In estimating the order of guilt of the various countries we may safely say that the only direct and immediate responsibility for the World War falls upon Serbia, France and Russia, with the guilt about equally divided." Sidney Bradshaw Fay, another American, presented a more scholarly case for revision of the Versailles conclusions. Fay wrote that that no one country or person was responsible:"None of the Powers wanted a European War.... Nevertheless, a European War broke out. Why? Because in each country political and military leaders did certain things which led to mobilizations and declarations of war, or failed to do certin things which might have prevented them. In this sense, all the European countries, in a greater or less degree, were responsible. One must abandon the dictum of the Versailles Treaty that Germany and her allies were solely responsible." Bernadotte E. Schmitt, a noted scholar also writing in the 1930s, concluded that perhaps Fate was responsible for the war: "In every country there was an instinctive feeling that the future, for an indefinite period, was at stake, that the nation which did not play its part would be outdistanced in the eternal competition of peoples, and that any sacrifice must be borne to insure the continuance of historic traditions. In the face of this intense nationalism, which had been born of the French Revolution and intensified by the events of the nineteenth century, pacific instincts, s...
