Really, nice strawman. I never said Serbia was holding out on anyone, I said they were not being "Very generous" (quoted words, not my idea). I said so because they rejected a demand that mattered, rather than rejecting Austria's demand for its shoes or whatever ancillary terms they cooked up. Hence they were, to me, generous at best but probably not even that.
Have you read the terms of Serbia's acceptance of the ultimatum?
They agreed to censor their own press to make it illegal to criticise Austria-Hungary. They agreed to close down any private organisations and political parties which Austria-Hungary claimed were hostile to its interests. They agreed to remove textbooks from schools and dismiss teachers from their jobs if they criticised Austria-Hungary. They agreed to dismiss any army officers or civil servants who were deemed to be anti-Austrian.
These were all things that Austria-Hungary had demanded from them. Do you honestly see them as 'ancillary terms'? More to the point, can you imagine world reaction if, for example, China issued such demands today to the Philippines, or Putin's Russia made similar demands on Poland?
Yet Serbia meekly agreed to them all.
When it came to the issue of the assassination, Serbia agreed to cooperate with Austria-Hungary in suppressing the 'subversive movement' behind the killings. They agreed to arrest the specific people named as suspects in the case (Tankosic and Ciganovich), as long as Austria-Hungary provided the evidence giving reasonable grounds for their arrest, as is normal for an extradition case. They agreed to investigate the people who allowed the assassins to cross the frontier, and try and punish them as appropriate.
The one demand they didn't agree to completely was allowing the Austro-Hungarian police to come into Serbia to investigate the assassination plot and make arrests and hold trials
on their own authority. They said, apologetically, that this would be against their constitution, but they were ready to hold investigations and stage trials themselves, and would keep the Austro-Hungarian police informed of everything they found out.
That was the "rejection" that was apparently sufficiently serious as to justify four years of war and over ten million dead.
Again, imagine if the FBI sent investigators to the Kremlin tomorrow, claiming they were investigating Russian involvement in the recent email scandals; and they made it clear that they expected to be able to arrest anybody up to and including Putin himself, and take him back to Washington DC for a trial. Do you think the Russians would happily welcome them in and give them carte blanche? Or would they object that this was a violation of their sovereignty? (Or if you prefer, imagine Iraqi police turning up in the Pentagon and the White House in the USA, claiming to be conducting an investigation into war crimes in Iraq.)
So basically the Serbian response to the ten points of the ultimatum was 1) Yes 2) Yes 3) Yes 4) Yes 5) Yes 6) We can't do exactly that but we'll do the best we can under our constitution 7) Yes 8) Yes 9) Yes 10) Yes.
Even Kaiser Wilhelm's initial reaction was that the Serbian acceptance of 95% of the ultimatum meant that there was now no excuse for war. (Although he was disappointed, not relieved; and went on to add that the Austrian troops should invade Serbia anyway, just to make a point and ensure that the Serbs did what they'd promised to do.)
