Ignite

The other night I had the pleasure of giving yet another Ignite Liverpool talk, this time entitled “How did the First World War start?”.

I’ve always had an interest in modern history, and the excellent (although exceedingly long!) series by Dan Carlin called Blueprint For Armageddon was the inspiration for this talk. Ever since I first heard about it at school, I’ve never heard a good explanation as to how the First World War started until recently. In this talk I had just five minutes to tell the story and I think I got all the key facts in with one exception: the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand.

The story of the assassination of Franz Ferdinand contains the most extraordinary coincidence, so allow me to give some background. In 1914, Archduke Franz Ferdinand is heir to the throne of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, set to take over from his elderly father Franz Josef. Imagine Prince Charles but popular and powerful. He goes to Sarajevo to observe military maneuvers. Now if you know your geography, you might be thinking that Sarajevo, capital of modern day Bosnia, is quite a long way from Austria. Well that’s true, and various people from neighboring Serbia weren’t too keen on a foreign power meddling in the Balkans. A group conspires (a genuine conspiracy, they do happen!) to kill the Archduke. One of the conspirators is the infamous Gavrilo Princip.

The Archduke and his wife Sophie get into an open-topped car and start on a procession through the city. The Archduke is in full military garb and sticks out like a sore thumb. The conspirators line the route, and one of them emerges from the crowd and throws a bomb at the car. The bomb misses, goes off and injures a bunch of people. Everyone panics and the royal couple get away. The conspirator who threw the bomb attempts to kill himself by biting on a cyanide pill and jumping in the river. Trouble is, the cyanide pill doesn’t work and the water is only a few inches deep, so he gets caught by the authorities pretty quickly. The rest of them drift away, with Princip ending up in a cafe.

Meanwhile, the Archduke and his wife Sophie consider what to do next. Now, you’d think that as they were nearly killed and people want them dead, so they’d get out of there and go back to Austria as soon as possible, right? Well, not quite. The Archduke wants to go and visit the wounded in hospital. So they get back in the open-topped car, the Archduke still in his military garb, and set off for the hospital. There’s just one problem: the driver doesn’t really know the way. They take a wrong turn, but instead of carrying on and finding a different route, the driver decides to stop and reverse the car. As he does this the engine stalls, leaving the royal couple totally exposed. It just so happens that car has stalled outside a cafe. The very cafe that Gavrilo Princip has gone to. He gets up, takes out his gun, and the rest is history.

I find this coincidence absolutely incredible, because of course it started a complex chain of events which resulted in the start of the First World War. Amazing how so much history was changed by a coincidence and the actions of one man.

I’d like to finish by recommending a couple of things: firstly, if you are in the Liverpool area, come along to the next Ignite! It’s penciled in for the next Star Wars day (May 4th naturally). Secondly, if you go along to Ignite Liverpool or catch up later with their YouTube channel, why not donate to them via Patreon?