It is our duty on Remembrance Sunday to honour the fallen. But to do justice to their sacrifice, we should also remember why the world descended into war in 1914. The history of the Great War has captivated and divided historians since Serbian nationalist Gavrilo Princip fired that fateful shot at Austro-Hungarian Archduke Franz Ferdinand on 28 June 1914. Only later did we come to realise the full significance of that date. British military historian of the First World War and Conservative cabinet minister, Alan Clark, recorded the moment in his diary on Tuesday, 28 June 1983, with characteristic wit: ‘Today is the sixty-ninth anniversary of the assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand at Sarajevo, the date from which the world changed. At the time, no one knew what it meant, though I often think of that prize-winning spoof headline in the New York Daily News in June 1920: “Archduke found alive, World War a mistake.”’
Herein lie lessons for today’s armchair pundits who forecast a Third World War
How the First World War began remains a rich field of historical inquiry.
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