28 June 1914: The assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria (1863-1914), heir to the crown of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, & Sophie, Duchess of Hohenberg (1868-1914), his wife—the precipitating event of the First World War.
Commentary: For the next five years, we here at "The Explorers' Club" will be remembering the First World War, dedicating a minimum of one episode per month to the centenary of an event during the Great War, on or about the date it happened in 1914-1919. This may tinge "The Explorers' Club" with sepia tones of tragedy, but 'tis necessary, tis essential that we remember "the war to end all wars," lest the glorious dead died in vain, lest Western civilization again marches enthusiastically toward Tophet. As Rudyard Kipling, who lost his boy Jack to the war, wrote, "Lest we forget." Lest we forget.
The Rebel Black Dot Song of the Day
Dropkick Murphys, "The Green Fields of France (No Man's Land)" from The Warrior's Code (T.L.A.M.)
Commentary: The Weltkrieg was not inevitable, it was nor foreordained. The men who chose to start it & the men who marched off to fight it had no idea what it would become. Why should the assassination of the Austrian imperial heir lead to Japan's seizure of Germany's colonies in the Pacific? Why should the violent aspirations of Yugoslavian nationalists lead to American doughboys dying in the mud of France? War, once commenced, takes on a life of its own, & he who thinks himself its master is a fool, & war's unwitting tool. Poison gas, strategic bombing (via both airship & aeroplane), the invention of the tank, why should any of it spun out of an assassin's bullet in Sarajevo in the summer of 1914? Because that is what we chose. We neither anticipated nor appreciated the consequences of the choices we made, but we made those fateful choices & faced their baleful consequences all the same.
"And I see by your gravestone you were only nineteen
When you joined the great fallen in Nineteen Sixteen.
Well, I hope you died quick and I hope you died clean;
Oh, Willy McBride, was it slow and obscene?
"Did they beat the drum slowly?
Did they play the fife lowly?
Did the sound the death march as they lowered you down?
Did the band play the 'Last Post' and chorus?
Did the pipes play 'The Flowers of the Forest'?
"And did you leave a wife or a sweetheart behind?
In some loyal heart is your memory enshrined?
And though you died back in Nineteen Sixteen
To that loyal heart you're forever nineteen.
Or are you a stranger without even a name,
Forever enshrined behind some old glass pane,
In an old photograph torn and tattered and stained
And faded to yellow in a brown leather frame…"
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