Alan Bardos looks back at the long legacy of the First World War, which still causes conflict over a century later.
This August marked the 110th anniversary of the start of the First World War and, with conflict in Eastern Europe and the Middle East, it seems an appropriate moment to trace how the war, whose legacy resulted in the current crises, started.
It is a story I tell in my novel The Assassins, which focuses on how the Austro-Hungarian Crown Prince, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, was assassinated largely by accident, and the failure to find a political solution to the ensuing diplomatic crises that plunged the world into war.
The origins of the assassination can be traced to the annexation of Bosnia and Herzegovina by the Austro-Hungarian monarchy in 1910 from the crumbling Ottoman Empire. This brought the monarchy into conflict with neighbouring Serbia, who also claimed the territory as part of a Greater Serbia.
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Elements in Serbian Intelligence began a ‘Cold War’ with Austro-Hungary, sending anti-Austrian propaganda across the border to whip up dissent amongst the population.
They also armed and trained assassins in Belgrade, one such group was led by a 19-year-old Bosnian Serb student called Gavrilo Princip. Princip was part of a growing nationalist movement who wanted to liberate their homeland from Austro-Hungarian rule and create a South Slav state, comprising all its people.
By 1914 things were starting to come to a head in the Balkans. The Austro-Hungarian government decided to send Archduke Franz Ferdinand to Bosnia to attend military manoeuvres. It was hoped that sending the heir to the throne into such a volatile region would strengthen the monarchy’s rule, firstly by charming the local population with a royal visit and secondly to demonstrate its military might.
This was a highly provocative move to both Serbia and the South Slav nationalists, who joined forces and embarked on a plot to assassinate Franz Ferdinand when he came to Bosnia.
Austro-Hungarian intelligence was well aware of various plots against Archduke Franz Ferdinand and the danger posed by Serbia, but they did not take them seriously.
This reflects the Austro-Hungarian government’s attitude to the threat posed by the nationalist movements in their Balkan provinces and explains why no attempt was made to counter the movements. The security services simply did not believe they existed, let alone constituted a threat.
Repeated warnings of a possible assassination attempt were ignored by the local military governor, General Potiorek, the Archduke himself, and the Austro-Hungarian government. The idea that half-starved schoolboys could be any kind of a danger was too ridiculous to contemplate.
This is the main theme I wanted to explore in The Assassins, through my two lead fictional characters: Johnny Swift, a feckless British diplomat, and Lazlo Breitner, a methodical Hungarian official.
Breitner is well aware of the threat from the assassins and does everything he can to persuade his superiors of the danger posed by the nationalist movements and when they dismiss his warnings Breitner is forced to take drastic measures. He coerces Swift into becoming one of the ‘half-starved schoolboys’ and to infiltrate Princip’s cell to find out their plans.
The circumstances leading up to the assassination were a combination of tragedy and comedy, and Swift is up to his neck in it. There was a rough plan to ambush the Archduke’s motorcade, as it travelled to a reception in Sarajevo’s guildhall, when he visited the city on 28 June, 1914.
However, only one of the assassins acted. Nedeljko Cabrinovic threw a bomb at the Archduke’s car, but missed. When the motorcade reached the reception the Archduke’s itinerary was cut short to avoid any further danger in the narrow backstreets that the Archduke was scheduled to drive through.
The Archduke, however, wanted to visit the wounded from the earlier bombing. In the resulting confusion the change of route was not communicated to the driver of the first car in the Archduke’s motorcade. When the motorcade left the reception the lead driver stuck to the original route and turned into a backstreet.
As the Archduke’s car began to follow, Potiorek realised the mistake and ordered the driver to stop. By chance it was in front of Gavrilo Princip who closed his eyes and fired twice with a Browning model semi-automatic pistol, killing the Archduke and his wife Sophie.
The hawks in the Austro-Hungarian government saw the assassination as a “gift from Mars”, which gave them the opportunity to settle scores with Serbia and to seize further territory in the region. The Germans placed gunpowder next to this spark, giving Austro-Hungry a blank cheque to take punitive action against Serbia, while Serbia received the backing of Russia.
Breitner and Swift are caught up in the evolving police investigation and diplomatic crisis desperately trying to prevent it from escalating into war.
The effect of the events leading up to the First World War can still be seen today in Eastern Europe and the Middle East. The war had catastrophic repercussions for the old order, and, when their empires toppled, the world’s fault lines changed.
New nations were formed and, as the assassins had hoped, a new South Slav state was created. A new Ukraine state also emerged from the Austro-Hungarian monarchy and Imperial Russia.
This state was absorbed by Lenin into the Soviet Union as a republic, but firmly under the control of the Communist Party. When the Soviet Union broke up Ukraine declared independence and its sovereignty is still very much in dispute.
The First World War also led to the destruction of the Ottoman Empire, and its former territory was divided between France and Great Britain; with Palestine being made a British mandate by the League of Nations.
The terms of the mandate included the ideas laid down in the Balfour Declaration of 1917, which was issued as a direct result of the First World War. In it Britain recognised the creation of a Jewish homeland in Palestine.
The subsequent implementation of the Balfour Declaration led to an increase in tension between Jewish settlers and the Palestinian Arabs over the ownership of the land, and a dispute that is still bitterly contested.
Although the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand was not the sole cause of the First World War, what I wanted to examine in my novel was how it was the ‘inciting incident’ that set the war in motion.
The legacy of which still reverberates through the decades.
The Assassins by Alan Bardos was published on 19 February, 2021.
Alan has written about the historical background to his latest novel, Rising Tide, in From Taranto to Pearl Harbor – spies and inspiration. You may also enjoy his review of Munich Wolf by Rory Clements.
For more about WWI, have a look at:
The General Who Wept by Chris Moore
The fight for our battlefields by Tim Lynch
And for another world-shaping royal assassination, that of Tsar Alexander II:
Did radicals and reactionaries unite against Tsar Alexander II? by RN Morris
Images:
- Assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife, Sophie, in Sarajevo by Achille Beltrame, La Domenica del Corriere, 12 July, 1914: Wikimedia (public domain)
- The Balkan Crisis, Le Petit Journal,18 October, 1908: Wikimedia (public domain)
- Archduke Franz Ferdinand by Ferdinand Schmutzer, c1914: Wikimedia (public domain)
- Čabrinović, Ciganović, and Princip in Belgrade’s Topčider Park shortly before leaving for Sarajevo, 1914: Wikimedia (public domain)
- Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie leave the Sarajevo Guildhall after reading a speech on June 28 1914. They were assassinated five minutes later: Wikimedia (CC BY-SA 3.0)
- Assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand from the Washington Examiner: Wikimedia (public domain)
