Looking forward to summer

A day at the seaside, 1914

Just like today, 100 years ago, people were enjoying the arrival of good weather and looking forward to holidays and days at the beach or picnics in the country. Zippers and the foxtrot were becoming popular, the Panama canal was linking the Atlantic and the Pacific, and Ernest Shackleton was setting off to cross Antarctica.

Of course there were troubles, the Balkans had just suffered through two wars, Ireland was agitating increasingly aggressively for independence and Britain and Germany were competing to build more and better battleships. There was crushing poverty in the industrialized countries, racism and imperialism were taken for granted and socialists, anarchists and suffragettes were struggling, sometimes violently, for a better world. However, there hadn't been a major, world war since Napoleon had been defeated at Waterloo almost a century before, technology was bound to make life better and rational minds would solve the political problems of the day.  Many people believed that humanity was on the right path and the world was headed for a bright future. They were horribly wrong.

Festive crowds, unaware of what was to come.

As May turned to June, 1914, a nineteen-year-old student was undertaking a "mystic journey" from Belgrade in Serbia to Sarajevo in Austrian-controlled Bosnia. The student was helped along the way, but it was still a brutal nine day trek. Without a permit, he had to travel at night, trudging through mud and freezing rain with not enough to eat and haunted by the fear of capture. He carried primitive bombs and a selection of pistols concealed in his clothing, and a fanatical certainty in the rightness of his beliefs in his head.

Gavro Princip knew that Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the heir to the throne of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, was going to visit Sarajevo soon. He believed that all Serbs should be part of a greater Serbia, free from the hated Austrian tyrants. He thought that assassinating Franz Ferdinand would be a step towards that goal. Princip wanted to change the world. Never in his wildest dreams could he have imagined how dramatically and tragically he would succeed.