THE GUNS OF AUGUST

In June, 90 years ago, the Archduke Franz Ferdinand decided to tour the military installations of the Austrian Empire. He was the brother of the Habsburg Emperor, Franz Josef, the last emperor of Austria, who reigned for nearly 70 years. Ferdinand had married a commoner, Sophie, with whom he was very much in love. The rest of the most powerful of European families considered this a morganatic marriage, and Sophie was snubbed, and frequently prohibited from attending official functions in Vienna and elsewhere.

But in Ferdinand's capacity as Commander in Chief of the Austro-Hungarian armed forces, Sophie was assured that she would be shown the deepest respect when she took these tours with him. Ferdinand had decided to visit Sarajevo, the capital of Bosnia-Herzogovina, which Austria had annexed in 1908, much to the enraged frustration of Serbian nationalists. Ferdinand decided to visit on the anniversary of the 1389 defeat of the Serbs by the Turks in Kosovo, an act which further enraged the Serbs. The Serbs were waiting for him, and although his driver managed to escape two earlier attempts, when he turned into an unknown street, and decided to turn the car around, one of those Serbs, Gavrilo Princep, jumped onto the running board, and shot the Archduke and Sophie to death.

Thereafter, the Austrians put the screws to the Serbs. Historians have since learned that the German Imperial War Minister encouraged the Austrians to believe that the German Empire would back their play, as it was almost certain that war with Serbia would bring Russia in on the Serbian side. The Serbs agreed to every demand, no matter how humiliating, until the Austrians told them that suspects would be tried in Serbia by an Austrian court. The Serbs pleaded on this single point, and the international community, when it bothered to pay any attention, scolded the Austrians as well. But the Austrians pushed it far enough, and the Great War began.

Without subscribing to any of the inevitability schools of thought, i would just point out some of the profound effects of this war, other than the obvious ones of millions dead and Belgium and France ravaged. This war created Czechoslovakia, which, following the lines of what had traditionally been Bohemia, left a substantial number of "Sudeten" Germans in that territory, which Hitler would one day use as a causus belli. Poland was reborn, and the city of Danzig (Gdansk) was made a free city; the "Polish corridor," the strip of Polish territory between Danzig and Germany, would provide the stage upon which Hitler would stage his pretext for war with Poland, and the outbreak of the Second World War in Europe. The Kingdom of Yugoslavia was created, and modern readers won't need to be reminded of how lovingly the Slovenes, Croatians, Bosnias, Serbs, Macedonians and Albanian Kosovars regard one another. What the Tsar Nicholas I had described as "the Sick Old Man of Europe"--the Osmanli Turkish Empire--collapsed, and Syria, the Lebanon, Palestine, Jordan, Saudia Arabia and Iraq were created from the wreckage. Japan had long before the war entered into an agreement with the English to "watch their backs" in the Pacific, and lived up to their engagements at the outset by sending a cruiser to the Pacific coast of Canada to protect them from a German cruiser known to be operating off the coast of the United States. They also seized all the German island territory in the Pacific, and began down their road to empire. Italy had switched sides early in the war, and as an Ally, were left a free hand for their comic opera attempts at empire building in Africa after the war. Little Canada, with about seven million inhabitants, provided more than 600,000 troops, of whom more than 66,000 were killed, and more than 172,000 maimed--as a proportion, these were the highest casualties of the war. Had the United States had similar numbers, we would have fielded eight and a half million troops, rather than the three million we eventually sent to Europe, and rather than the 57,000+ Americans who were killed (absolutely and not just comparatively fewer than Canadian combat deaths), we would have lost nearly 800,000. For Australia and New Zealand, it signalled their military "coming out," with real manpower commitments rather than the selected few units which had fought in the Boer War. South Africa fielded an army to help deal with Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck, who took fewer than 5,000 Germans and about 10,000 Askaris (black African troops--some white Africans have never forgiven him for arming blacks and using them to kill white soldiers) and ran the English ragged until two weeks after the war, surrendering finally on November 25, 1918, after he received reliable information that the German Empire had surrendered. He had tied up well over ten times his number, and large numbers of troops from the subcontinent--those whom we would consider Indians and Pakistanis--were shipped to Africa in the vain attempt to protect the ports and railroads from this German military genius. The political landscape of Africa was forever altered.

In so many ways, and in so many places, the Great War had a profound effect on so many peoples. What are your thoughts on this horrendous debacle for humanity, which began ninety years ago?