1914

In May 1914, three sickly school dropouts, Gavrilo Princip, Nedeljko Cabrinovic, and Trifko Grabez, were dispatched from Belgrade, Serbia, on a suicidal fool’s errand to assassinate the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir apparent to the throne of the Habsburgs, on the streets of Bosnia’s capital, Sarajevo. They were sent by a secret society, Ujedinjenje Ili Smrt, (“Unification or Death”) the Black Hand, which dreamed of  bringing an end to centuries of foreign rule over the Orthodox Bosnian Serbs, first by Muslim Ottoman Turks and then by Roman Catholic Austrians. To everyone’s surprise, they succeeded in killing the Archduke and his beautiful wife, igniting three days of violent anti-Serbian riots in Sarajevo. Within six weeks Serbia, Austria, Russia, Germany, and France had mobilized, German Uhlans had crossed the Belgian border, and all of Europe was at war.

The arrogant autocrats who sounded the war trumpets in the summer of 1914 all saw compelling reasons to go to war. "But at what price?” German Chancellor Bethmann-Hollweg asked the English ambassador, Sir Edward Goschen, when he tried desperately to persuade Goschen to keep England on the sidelines. No one thought deeply enough about that question. Instead, they stumbled into a catastrophic war of attrition, one that was fought in no man’s land between opposing trench lines for four bloody years. Before the Great War ended on the eleventh hour of eleventh day of the eleventh month of 1918, its human cost was staggering, something over eight million lives lost in combat. In France, Germany, and England, about one in three men who were between 19 and 22 years of age when the war broke out was killed. They were the lost generation. Three great empires, the Austro-Hungarian, Russian, and Ottoman Turkish, were all destroyed. 1914 explores what happened that fateful summer.