Still dealing with unfinished business of a single gunshot

THIS year is the centenary of the ‘war to end all wars’.

They’re making a big thing of it here with historians popping out of the woodwork telling us how significant the First World War was and how it changed history forever.

Until now, I have given it much thought. For a start, it wasn’t the war to end all wars as there has been some vicious punch-ups somewhere in the world pretty much ever since.

Thus the First World War never featured on my radar. As a kid I grew up reading Second World War pulp comics where clever chaps called Tommy outwitted thickies called Kurt.

Then in my teenage years, the Vietnam War was fought, which intrigued me as it inspired some great writing and even greater photography. But more fascinating, it was the first, and probably only, rock ‘n roll war where soldiers went into battle listening to the Rolling Stones and The Doors.

However, the First World War has no such ‘glamour’ – if such a word can be used for the nasty business of combat.

In fact, thanks to relentless lampooning in shows such as Blackadder, the exact opposite applies; the perception of brave young soldiers being massacred in their millions owing to inept leadership by toff buffoons, persists to this day.

History proves that to be a lie and proportionally more toff officers died in the trenches than troopies. My brats went to a minor private school and the list of names of those who died for their country beautifully carved into oak-panelled rolls of honour is heart-wrenchingly impressive. The toff officers overwhelmingly came from the private schools.

But as far as wars go, the First World War has indeed had a more profound effect on the world than anything in its wake. All other wars pale beside it. Even the scars of Vietnam are healing as that country is now a significant emerging economy.

War of change

So, as history shows, it was the First World War that really changed everything.

Technically, the war started on 28 June, 1914 when Gavrilo Princip shot Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the heir to the Habsburg throne which ruled much of Europe, and his wife Sophia in Bosnia.

Princip was a Balkans nationalist and to say he and his fellow plotters hadn’t quite thought this assassination lark through is being kind.

After shooting the Archduke and his squeeze, Princip popped a cyanide pill that was way past its sell-by date. So instead of karking it, he was captured with a mild headache.

His co-conspirator, Nedeljko Cabrinovic jumped into the River Miljacka while fleeing, but hadn’t bargained on it only being 10cm deep. Consequently a suspicious man standing ankle-deep in a river flowing through a city tended to attract the notice of the cops, who promptly arrested him.

Too young to be hanged, Princip was jailed in Terezin. He died of malnutrition in 1918 at the age of 23, ironically around the same time of the demise of the Habsburg Empire itself.

Bunglers or not, Princip’s bullet plunged Europe into a slaughter that no-one could imagine. It was the most momentous gunshot ever fired. It destroyed the Habsburg dynasty, the Russian Czars and the German and Ottoman empires. In the vacuum came Communism, Fascism and Nazism and the seething imbroglio of the modern Middle East.

The after-shocks of this are still with us. For example, the now-defunct border between Syria and Iraq, which is on the verge of falling to Islamic Jihadis, was one arbitrarily drawn on the map by the English and French when the Ottoman Empire collapsed at the end of the Great War.

That is why the calamitous events that started with an assassin’s bullet 100 years ago are so tectonic.

We are still dealing with that unfinished business today.