The guns of August 1914 didn't fire themselves. Politicians, generals, and central bankers loaded them over decades. The standard story blames Franz Ferdinand's assassination in Sarajevo on June 28, 1914. That explanation satisfies nobody who thinks carefully. Archduke assassinations were not rare in that era. What made this one ignite a continental war was the institutional infrastructure built to make escalation automatic: interlocking military alliances, general staffs with mobilization timetables that could not be paused, and governments funded by central banks that made unlimited war finance possible for the first time in history. Before the Bank of England normalized deficit spending, wars ended when treasuries emptied. Governments negotiated. Central banking changed this. A state could now print, borrow, and conscript indefinitely. Inflation was the essential prerequisite of total war. Without it, the trenches of the Somme were literally unaffordable. Ludwig von Mises identified this in "Nation, State, and Economy" (1919). Consider the numbers. Britain expanded its money supply by roughly 1,000 percent between 1914 and 1918. Germany printed so aggressively that it destroyed its own currency by 1923. Every shell fired at Passchendaele, where 325,000 British soldiers became casualties in three months of mud, was purchased with debased currency that quietly robbed citizens of purchasing power while the government told them it was patriotism. War does not emerge from human nature alone, it scales with the institutional capacity to fund it. Remove the central bank, and the appetite for conquest meets a hard budget constraint very quickly.