No doubt the Kaiser was warmongering... but I[’m merely pointing out that when you have a people with a wounded national pride (the French emperor Napoleon III was hauled back as a prisoner publicly after the disastrous battle at Sedan, for one thing, the humiliating loss of Alsace-Lorraine, another) and you’re teaching a couple of generations of schoolkids that the hated Boche are the root cause of all of your ills and woes, it doesn’t take much to make a spark into a conflagration. They were itching for a fight, and they got one.
NOT letting the Kaiser off the hook here, merely pointing out that if it wasn’t the assassination of Archduke Frankie and his wife, it would have been something else.
Check out Alistair Horne’s book The Price of Glory. He goes into a lot of detail of the pre-war mindset of the French and the Germans. One gets the impression of the two biggest mouths on the block; sooner or later, they’re going to meet up.
Sure, I get that -- the tinder was bone dry, kindling stacked everywhere, all it needed was a spark from anywhere to conflate the whole forest.
But when the Fire Department investigates, they will not be satisfied to report "the spark may have come from anywhere," when they know it actually came from little Willie playing with matches and hoping to burn down little Johnny's play-fort without losing his own.