The following item was posted this morning in Garrison Keillor’s “The Writers’ Almanac.” The asassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand was the event that triggered the First World War. That was destabilized Europe, destroyed empires, and created the social and economic conditions that led to the Second World War. We are still living with the consequences of what happed on June 28, 1914.
It was on this day in 1914 that Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria and his wife, Sophie, were assassinated in Sarajevo, Bosnia, which began a chain of events that ultimately led to World War I.
In 1882, Germany, Italy, and Austria-Hungary signed a Triple Alliance. Britain was nervous about Russian expansion, but was allied with France, who was allied with Russia, so eventually Britain also agreed to an alliance with Russia; the alliance between those three nations became known as the “Triple Entente.”
By the time that Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated, the alliances were so complex that any act of aggression by any nation toward any other was almost guaranteed to set off a conflict across all of Europe.
Franz Ferdinand was the heir to the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He went to visit Sarajevo, where he was not very popular. Sarajevo was the capital of Bosnia, one of the provinces of Austria-Hungary. But many Bosnians had no interest in being part of the empire, and there were radical militant groups like the Black Hand Gang trying to unite the various Slavic territories under their own rule. The archduke’s assassin, Gavrilo Princip was a 19-year-old member of the Black Hand. Another member of the Black Hand had tried to assassinate Franz Ferdinand earlier that morning, but the grenade he threw had a 10-second delay, so it exploded under a car behind the royal couple, seriously injuring several other people. The archduke changed his parade route so that he could go visit the victims in the hospital, but his driver took a wrong turn. The driver stalled the car while he tried to back up, and Princip just happened to be on that street close to the car. So he pulled out a pistol and shot Franz Ferdinand and Sophie from just a few feet away. Both of them died before they made it to the hospital.
Austria-Hungary immediately blamed the attack on Serbia. The assassination was the excuse that Austria-Hungary needed, and Emperor Franz Joseph declared war on Serbia. Serbia was a small nation, but it called on a powerful ally, Russia, who agreed to fight its side. And suddenly, all the allies were falling into line: Germany sided with Austria-Hungary, and after Germany declared war on France and invaded neutral Belgium, England declared war on Germany.
From the beginning, there were staggering death tolls during what was called “The Great War.” In the Battle of the Somme, close to 60,000 British soldiers died the first day, and by the time the four-month battle was over, more than 1.5 million soldiers had died. The 10-month Battle of Verdun ended with 540,000 French and 430,000 Germans dead. There are no exact death tolls, but an estimated 115,000 American soldiers died, 1.4 million French soldiers, 1.7 million German soldiers, and 1.7 million Russian soldiers.
On top of that, there was a huge financial cost, estimated at between $180 and 230 billion on direct military costs alone.
World War I is often represented as a pointless war — a war started by a relatively minor event, the assassination of Franz Ferdinand, and marked by long deadlocked battles. But historians say the conflict had been building for years. There were already strong tensions among the European nations, not only from conflicting alliances and naval competition, but also from competing stakes in colonial territories — Germany wanted to undermine the British and French empires; and empires like Austria-Hungary were weakened by ethnic conflict and rebellion.
These days, the most famous literature from World War I depicts the horror and the futility of the war — poems by Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen, and the novel All Quiet on the Western Front (1928) by Erich Maria Remarque, all of them soldiers as well as writers.
The historian Niall Ferguson wrote: “1914–18 was one of the great watersheds in financial history. The United States emerged for the first time as the rival to Great Britain as a financial super power. … It’s the point at which the United States firmly ceases to be a debtor and becomes a creditor nation — the world’s banker.”
And in the midst of all that, there was a pandemic.
Every spring the French still send munition experts to the Verdun forest to collect and sometimes detonate hundred year old munitions. There is so much lead in the ground that there are spots where vegetation will not grow. It is a stark reminder of the destruction caused by war. https://www.warhistoryonline.com/world-war-i/this-red-zone-in-france-is-so-dangerous-100-years-after-wwi-it-is-still-a-no-go-area.html
Check out the Poetry Foundation website for some great WWI poetry. The Great War hit just at the peak of the Zenith of interest in English poetry. How ironic.
If in some smothering dreams, you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,—
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.
The darkness crumbles away.
It is the same old druid Time as ever,
Only a live thing leaps my hand,
A queer sardonic rat,
As I pull the parapet’s poppy
To stick behind my ear.
Droll rat, they would shoot you if they knew
Your cosmopolitan sympathies.
Now you have touched this English hand
You will do the same to a German
Soon, no doubt, if it be your pleasure
To cross the sleeping green between.
It seems you inwardly grin as you pass
Strong eyes, fine limbs, haughty athletes,
Less chanced than you for life,
Bonds to the whims of murder,
Sprawled in the bowels of the earth,
The torn fields of France.
What do you see in our eyes
At the shrieking iron and flame
Hurled through still heavens?
What quaver—what heart aghast?
Poppies whose roots are in man’s veins
Drop, and are ever dropping;
But mine in my ear is safe—
Just a little white with the dust.
“Yes; quaint and curious war is!
You shoot a fellow down
You’d treat if met where any bar is,
Or help to half-a-crown.”
After the war perhaps I’ll sit again
Out on the terrace where I sat with you,
And see the changeless sky and hills beat blue
And live an afternoon of summer through.
I shall remember then, and sad at heart
For the lost day of happiness we knew,
Wish only that some other man were you
And spoke my name as once you used to do.
Roy,
Check out the anthologies I edited:
The American Reader
The Democracy Reader
The English Reader (with my son Michael)
Lots of poetry in 1 and 3
I would also highly recommend Joe Sacco’s Bayonne Tapestry-inspired The Great War.
https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/joe-saccos-the-great-war
Required reading in my high school English class was Johnny Got His Gun by Dalton Trumpo. It was a frightening book to read, but it clearly left an impression as I still remember it.
It’s a devastating book. As is All Quiet on the Western Front, by Erich Maria Remarque.
Bob, Remarque is one of my favorite writers. I’ve read all but his final, unfinished novel. I hope you find time for some of his other works. Perhaps my favorite the poorly translated title, not, to my knowledge is the case with the text, Flotsam (the original title should be translated as Love Thy Neighbor), which is about political refugees of Naziism. A Spark of Life was the first novel about the Holocaust ever published. Also exceptional. As are all his books.
Thank you, Greg!!! I’ll definitely do this. For some idiotic reason, I never thought to look at his other work, as much as I loved this one!
Check out his biography on Wikipedia. He led a remarkable life. His sister was murdered the Nazi prison system just because she was his sister. The Remarque Hotel in his hometown of Osnabrück has wall coverings featuring his hand-written manuscripts.
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/788647450
Will do, Greg!
None of this had to happen: https://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/kant/kant1.htm
Read after the fact of the war, Kant’s “Perpetual Peace” is prophetic and immeasurably sad. This didn’t have to happen.