Sleepy with the flow of streams,
Far I hear the steady drummer
Drumming like a noise in dreams.
A.E. Houseman
It is June the 28th, 2014. One hundred years ago today, on sunny and festive Sunday morning in Sarajevo, a young Serbian radical named Gavrilo Princip shot and killed the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the throne of Austria-Hungary, and his wife Sophie. The event received some news coverage at the time, but not enough to disturb the peoples of Europe who were in the midst of enjoying what was shaping up to be an unusually fine and glorious summer. The best in living memory, some said. The wealthy continued to relax on their holidays. The rural folk were summoned by the pealing of church bells to worship, as they had been for centuries. They were subjects of Kings and Emperors whose lineages stretched back into the Middle Ages; their lives governed by the ebb and flow of the seasons as they had always been. A single assassination in Eastern Europe was hardly enough to disturb such ancient and venerable traditions.
Yet, within five weeks, the five great powers of Europe would go to war, and the world of the summer of 1914 would be gone forever. The quiet would be shattered, the Ottoman, Hapsburg and Russian Empires would fall, and the twentieth-century forces of communism and fascism would rise in their place. The United States and the Soviet Union would emerge as global powers. The modern Middle East would be drawn up in London and Paris, the League of Nations would emerge as the first organisation of international co-operation, old ideas would be rejected and new ones like nationalism, socialism and feminism would become mainstream. The lives of ordinary people were changed drastically, for good or for ill. As English historian A. J. P. Taylor wrote in 1965:
The end result of that shot would be the post-1918 world, the world in which we live today. There are few alive today who have any experience of anything else.Until August 1914 a sensible, law-abiding Englishman could pass through life and hardly notice the existence of the state, beyond the post office and the policeman. He could live where he liked and as he liked. He had no official number or identity card. He could travel abroad or leave his country for ever without a passport or any sort of official permission. He could exchange his money for any other currency without restriction or limit. He could buy goods from any country in the world on the same terms as he bought goods at home. For that matter, a foreigner could spend his life in this country without permit and without informing the police. Unlike the countries of the European continent, the state did not require its citizens to perform military service. An Englishman could enlist, if he chose, in the regular army, the navy, or the territorials. He could also ignore, if he chose, the demands of national defence. Substantial householders were occasionally called on for jury service. Otherwise, only those helped the state who wished to do so. The Englishman paid taxes on a modest scale: nearly £200 million in 1913-14, or rather less than 8 per cent of the national income. The state intervened to prevent the citizen from eating adulterated food or contracting certain infectious diseases. It imposed safety rules in factories, and prevented women, and adult males in some industries, from working excessive hours. The state saw to it that children received education up to the age of 13. Since 1 January 1909, it provided a meagre pension for the needy over the age of 70. Since 1911, it helped to insure certain classes of workers against sickness and unemployment. [But with the outbreak of the war] The mass of the people became, for the first time, active citizens. Their lives were shaped by orders from above; they were required to serve the state instead of pursuing exclusively their own affairs. Five million men entered the armed forces, many of them (though a minority) under compulsion. The Englishman's food was limited, and its quality changed, by government order. His freedom of movement was restricted; his conditions of work prescribed. Some industries were reduced or closed, others artificially fostered. The publication of news was fettered. Street lights were dimmed. The sacred freedom of drinking was tampered with: licensed hours were cut down, and the beer watered by order. The very time on the clocks was changed. From 1916 onwards, every Englishman got up an hour earlier in summer than he would otherwise have done, thanks to an act of parliament. The state established a hold over it citizens which, though relaxed in peacetime, was never to be removed and which the Second World War was again to increase. The history of the English state and of the English people merged for the first time.
Princip remains a divisive figure in Sarajevo, which is today holding events to commemorate the assassination. But it is certain the Great War would have broken out sooner or later, even without him.
Here is quite a goof article from the Telegraph describing the events. And another from the Guardian on the divided views of people in Sarajevo today. No doubt there will be a lot more interesting commentary as the anniversary of the actual start of the war approaches.
