Today is the 100th anniversary of the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. His death, at the hands of a young Serb nationalist, Gavrilo Princip, set into motion the chain of events that led to World War I. Here is a copy of the headline in the New York Herald about the assassination.
The war that ensued was the turning point in world history, eventually leading to the collapse of the European control of most of the planet. Europe itself changed dramatically. Here is a map of pre-war Europe:
This is the map in 1919:
The devastation caused by the first truly industrial war was impossible to grasp. The soldiers were mindlessly ordered by generals who had little idea of how the new technologies had transformed the conduct of war. The soldiers followed their orders and suffered casualties that were unprecedented. The new weapons included the Dreadnaught:
The tank:
The Machine Gun (note the dog pulling the cart):
Mustard Gas:
And the largest artillery ever built:
The killing was nothing less than slaughter.
And the landscape was decimated:
Even today, one can see evidence of the trenches of 100 years ago. These are from the Battle of the Somme:
The war changed everything. And the effect on the minds of people in the world were best captured in the poem, “The Second Coming,” by William Butler Yeats.
William Butler Yeats (1865-1939)
THE SECOND COMING
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
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