Actually it will be 100 years ago tomorrow at 11:00AM, that Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir apparent to the Austrian-Hungarian throne, was pronounced dead. He and his wife Sophie had been shot by an assassin a few minutes earlier while on a visit to Sarajevo, capital of Bosnia. The assassin, Gavrilo Princip, was a Serbian nationalist. For the next few weeks, diplomats from all major European countries scurried frantically around (like John Kerry today), in an attempt to head off what too few feared could become an inevitable conflagration. At the same time, they considered mobilization, while measuring capabilities and readiness. They secured alliances.
Diplomacy came to naught. A month and a week later, on August 4th, a day after Germany declared war on France, England declared war on Germany; thereby engulfing the continent in total war. Within the month there would be 182,000 casualties, as German troops, in a week-long battle and outnumbered almost two to one, virtually annihilated Russia’s Second Army at the Battle of Tannenberg. Three battles alone, over the course of the War, saw more than 2.5 million casualties – Gallipoli, Verdun and the Somme. On the first day of the battle of the Somme, England had 60,000 casualties. By War’s end, four years later, three months and one week later 20 million of Europe’s youth would be dead, with even more millions injured. The foundations for the Second World War had been laid, causing the 20th Century to become the bloodiest in the history of mankind.
There are many who suggest that the world today is similarly positioned as it was in 1914. I suspect the differences are the more pronounced. Nevertheless, there are similarities. One hundred years ago, old empires were fading while new ones were rising. The Ottoman Empire had been in decline for some time. Its occupation of the Balkans had been absorbed by two fading empires – Tsarist Russia and the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The Turkish Straits, still owned by the Ottomans, were eyed enviously by the Russians. The British Colonial period was nearing an end; though most Brits could not see that happening. Germany was a relatively new country – like Italy it had been unified in the second half of the 19th Century – and since Bismarck’s time had been looking to expand east. The Slavic people in Serbia were flexing their muscles, chafing at borders arbitrarily drawn by Vienna and, to a lesser extent, by St. Petersburg. At least a dozen ethnic populations occupied the region, with three distinct religions dominant – Muslim, Orthodox Christians and Roman Catholics. It was a combustible mixture.
