I was about to ask a very similar question, so to avoid almost duplicates, I'll put it here. What I'd like to know is, particularly for WWI, at what point did it become obvious to the average European that the war was actually about to kick off?

For WWI, I've always had the impression (although I'm far from a historian, so I could be wrong) that very few people had any serious notion that a major European war was coming any time soon - smallish conflicts like the Balkan wars had happened, and there were various colonial hotspots around the world where European troops might get into a bit of fighting. And that all feels quite similar to the modern world to me - Western troops fighting in places like Iraq and Afghanistan, with conflicts in the Balkans again no that long ago, and with various trouble spots in Eastern Europe, but with the great powers mostly just sabre rattling at each other.

So my take has been that when Franz Ferdinand was shot and the various governments started threatening each other, it would have taken by the average person in the same way that I think most people are viewing the Ukraine crisis today - yes it could in theory be the start of a path to world war, but surely no-one's that stupid and eventually some face-saving compromise will be reached.

Assuming this is at least fairly accurate, what I'm wondering is did that mindset continue until the start of August, with everyone in the relevant countries waking up on the 1st-4th August shocked to find themselves at war, or was there a specific turning point where people started to think "actually this is looking pretty bad"?