It Began ...

Hey look, a historian wrote a book about something that happened exactly 100 yrs. ago. Today. Can you guess?

Ten minutes before the motorcade reached the Čumurja bridge a policeman approached Čabrinović, demanding that he identify himself. He produced a permit that purported to have been issued by the Viennese police and asked the policeman which car was carrying the archduke. ‘The third’ he was told. A few minutes later he took out his grenade, knocked off the detonator cap and threw it at the limousine carrying the archduke and the duchess. Because there was a twelve-second delay between knocking off the cap and the explosion, the grenade hit the limousine, bounced off, rolled under the next car, and exploded. General Potiorek’s aide-de-camp was injured, along with several spectators. The duchess suffered a slight wound to her cheek, where she had been grazed by the grenade’s detonator.

Čabrinović swallowed his cyanide capsule and jumped over the embankment into the river. But the cyanide failed and the river had been reduced to a mere trickle in mid-summer. He was captured immediately by a policeman who asked him if he was a Serb. ‘Yes, I am a Serb hero’, he replied.

In further amazement, the book,

Excerpted from “The Month that Changed the World: July 1914” by Gordon Martel. Copyright © 2014 by Gordon Martel. Reprinted by arrangement with Oxford University Press, a division of Oxford University. All rights reserved.

was excerpted on-line.

Anatomy of an assassination:
Two fateful days that sparked decades of horror

Trench art – showing a map of the Western Front.
The brim of the helmet is marked ‘H.G. Booth, 110th TMB AEF France 1918-’19’.
Henry G. Booth was a cook for the 110th Trench Mortar Battery.
AEF stands for ‘American Expeditionary Force’. (Text and Photograph © Jane A. Kimball)

Decades? We've yet to see the end of the beginning.

It began inauspiciously enough: On New Year’s Day, 1914, The New York Times carried a story about the merger of two British colonies, one Muslim, one Christian, to create Nigeria. There was a piece on Mexico’s revolution, another on a march by suffragists from Manhattan to Albany demanding the vote for women, and a notice that the North German Lloyd shipping line cut its rates to encourage trans-Atlantic passenger traffic.

Such was the prosaic start to the year that would launch the bloodiest war the world had ever known — one which, in one form or another, has raged on in different, ever more insidious forms for a century now. The idea that World War I can be viewed merely between 1914 and 1918 is absurd. It is the war that has never ended.

Here be the ++cursory video & helmet image.