> So by your own admission, they didn't start the war.

Depends on how you define 'start' and 'the War'. They didn't 'start' the Austrian invasion of Serbia but they gave them the diplomatic blank check that allowed this to happen. They then went on to pre-emptively attack France via Belgium, starting the full on World War as we know it. Perhaps you might say their diplomatic agreements gave them no choice, except there's been no shortage of chickening out on such assurances of allyship in the previous decades, averting war many times, and the reason the current alliances were set up in the way they are is that Wilhelm II, genius that he was, deluded himself into thinking he was great at personal diplomacy and that he was smarter than Bismarck, ruining every alliance he had by pissing everyone off being a rude weirdo, and generally being an incompetent and a laughingstock at every damn thing he did that wasn't playing dressup. Which, admittedly, he was great at.

I pity the fool because of his horrible childhood and the terrible upbringing that directly made him who he is, but that doesn't excuse his choices.

Monarchies are a bad idea, and monarchists are the saddest and most pitiful kind of simp.