National Post:The fatal shot that sparked the First World War
34 Replies to “100 Years Ago Today”
Article says the 28th, but close enough. I think there’s video of the shot as well believe it or not.
I attended a fascinating lecture about the origins of the First World War earlier this year at the Museum of the Regiments. It’s informative that it took European historians years following the conclusion of the war to ascertain how it had actually started, such was the web of secret alliances and intrigue that entangled Europe before its outbreak. It was by no means inevitable, a colossally tragic string of blunders and misunderstandings.
Would have been interesting to go to a lecture like that. A question I would have asked is why Canada sent any troops there in the first place. A bunch of imperial
powers fighting to keep Germany out of the club and Canada blindly sent her best there to die.
Was this the Museum on Crowchild in Calgary? I was there a while back. Enter in to each Regiments section and the entry had all their dead on the walls. When compared to WW II and Korea the dead in WW I was astounding. I suggest that if Canada, Australia and the USA had stayed home the Euros would have been forced to make peace with Germany. In all likelihood there never would have been a Hitler or a WW II.
There is a reasonably direct path from the end of WWI to just about every tragic event in the last 100 years. If the British and French could have resisted occupying the Middle East, the Arab with the biggest stick would be running the place, Israel wouldn’t exist, and we would have little interest there.
I remember reading in Pierre Burton’s book about Vimy that 80 percent of the Canadians who fought in WW1 were either British born, or the children of British born parents. It was basically an army of ex pat Brits. Canada was an extension of Britain so when Britain went to war, the Kings Canadian subjects didn’t think twice about it. This is why Vimy is so important in the creation of a separate Canadian identity.
A war we should never have been in.
The fact that the seething hatred continues after a century is disturbing. I encountered it personally when an American woman of Serbian origin found out that I was in the Canadian Forces while we were involved in the “Former Yugoslavia”. Her reaction was to say, “Then I have to hate you then”. Sad really.
It became a WW because of the doctrine of sanctity of treaties.
If Britain and Germany had begged off, it would have been over without the enormous bloodshed, followed by WWII. Once the mobilizations of the national armies began, war was inevitable. John Keegan wrote an excellent treatment of it.
Today I feel like the Hillcrest Mine disaster is a more important date to remember.
No, we had the best people of that generation slaughtered because European empires were treading on each others toes.
Writers love to claim that the Nation of Canada was “forged in the fire of Vimy Ridge” or some such romanticism.
All I ever saw was old shell-shocked guys who had the life stripped out of them by that terrible conflict. Most of ’em couldn’t talk about it thirty or forty years later, when we kids would ask what it was like,we’d be greeted by a vacant look and a shaken head,and they’d look down and we knew we shouldn’t have asked.`
Forged a Nation in that slaughterhouse? Not f***ing likely! We killed off the best of our Country for the snits of European imperialists.
My home town had a very high percentage of men volunteer for WW1,and so many we lost were the leaders of the community. When the rest of the best of the next generation was killed off in WW2, few came back,those that survived moved away,and that great little Prairie town is practically a ghost town now.
Sorry if I ranted a bit, but this subject is very near and dear to my heart as so many of my family fought and died in those two wars. My Grandfather was grievously wounded in a WW1 cavalry attack at Mons,and my Dad was never the same after he came home in 1946.
It took the European powers six weeks to decide that war was necessary after Prinzip shot the Archduke.If that event was so bloody important,what took so long?
War
Children
It’s just a shot away
Jagger-Richards
I think you meant that as a response to my comment. I agree with everything that you say about the futility of the war. What meant if I wasn’t clear is that 100 years after the fact we can say they “we” shouldn’t have got involved in “their” war. If you asked someone 100 years ago, they would likely have responded “what do you mean by us, and them, there is only we.” By the end of the war, there was an “us” and “them”, because Canadians had started to think of themselves as Canadians, as opposed to Brits who lived in Canada. When people talk about Vimy, and WW1 in general creating a Canadian identity, that’s what they mean.
And if your Grand dad was wounded in a cavalry charge at Mons, I’m going to guess that it was in 1914, and he was in the British Army. Am I right? Was he Canadian or British, and if he was from Canada, did he consider himself Canadian, or British?
Quite right, Scar. It’s absolutely direct between WWI and everything that’s happened since. The 1920s and ’30s were nothing more than a brief recess between two halves of the same war.
That said, WWI was inevitable. The Great Powers had been just itching for a good thorough squabble among themselves for about a generation. The Kaiser’s vision of Germany’s true place in the world was not all that greatly different from that of a demented Austrian painter.
And because they had not paid the slightest attention to the American Civil War, they operated under the assumption that it would be similar to the Napoleonic campaigns of the early 1800s. Short, swift, decisive, and all over in about 12 weeks. The Franco-Prussian War seemed to confirm this notion. They failed utterly to understand that The Wilderness and Petersburg in 1864 were in fact the true shape of things to come.
Wow. Great comments. Especially Don’s.
It’s June 28. For sure
And cgh. Exactly! The British, French, and Russians had been itching for a fight ever since Bismarck united the German states into one country in the 1860s. They could not stand competition in the global race to acquire colonies.
Yeah that attitude continued long after that….for the same reasons.
My father, a Brit(ne 1905) arrived in ’29 went back briefly in ’39 and was more or less a Brit and I suspect thought the UK had not changed.
He was not convinced by the reports by myself and siblings except he realized the Blitz had mucked things up a bit.
Then 1974, immediately after my mothers passing, he returned to the UK….
I am convinced he landed in Britain a Brit but returned a Canadian…
I suspect the WW1 Canadians got treated as “bloody colonials” and as a result acquired a national identity. Getting patronized and snubbed will inspire an us and them attitude.
I suspect the alleged “Balkan Powderkeg” was a symptom not the cause….the cause was much like the more recent Balkan conflict….they had forgotten what it was like and failed to grasp the nature of modern war…..they had overlooked the US War of Northern Aggression, the Franco-Prussian War and the Battle of Plevna(google it).
The Brits had learned well the lessons of the Boer War (rifle pits, marksmanship and not wearing Red). The Germans had already grasped the role of railways. All had machine guns and failed to realize the problem of the other guy having them too.
The recurring ritual of being prepared to fight the last war had begun.
Typical AP. Photo caption references Sarajevo Yugoslavia. Guess the caption writer skipped history the day they explained that Yugoslavia was formed following WWI
was born an Englishman but have lived in Canada since I was 3. I spent 1 1/2 years with the British Army, as a Canadian, on a training course. I don’t think we were treated as “bloody colonials”, when I was there (mind this was the 1990′).
My response to any Brit who said anything about colonials, and it must have happened because I remember saying it was to point out that the empire was created by those who left the motherland, not those who stayed.
It was the first of 2 senseless wastes of human life orchestrated by profiteers and their political enablers.
The arch Duke got clipped by a hired trigger man working for the new ascending European order. WWI had the agenda to create a power vacuum in central Europe where aristocratic oligarchs were to be displaced by a new financially aligned bureaucratic class – things went as planned after the treaty of Versailles with central Europe fully under the grip of globalist profiteers and Brussels bureaucrats until one of the new Euro-networking politicos got off the plantation and started free lancing for his own profit – then the Euro-elite sucked us back into the war grinder to bail them out again.
Looking at how this global bureaucratic elite have directed the political agenda of western nations in post WW policy, “freedom” was the last thing those two scraps were about. Our political leadership has broken faith with the spirit of those who sacrificed themselves in war because then as now, our freedom remains under bureaucratic attack universally.
The Turks would still be running the Middle East.
That’s because NATO led the ethnic cleansing of Serbs from many parts of the old Yugoslavia. We bombed the wrong people. That’s why there are almost no Christians left in Kosovo and there are a whole lot more mosques and militants in Bosnia(-Herzogovinia)
I disagree that war if futile. It is often necessary. Unpleasant; yes, I don’t disagree there but you have chosen the wrong word.
Valuable insight from Sasquatch, cgh, Occam and others.
Communism in Russia and income taxes in North America were the fallout from the Great War.
OTOH, gas warfare went down after the first war; the Japanese though did employ it during the Sino-Japanese War of 1931-1945 and Saddam employed it c. 1986 onwards.
“There is a reasonably direct path from the end of WWI to just about every tragic event in the last 100 years.”
But you could claim there was a reasonably direct path from the Battle of Waterloo to just about every tragic event in the 100 years leading to WWI. And you could go back every hundred years making the same claim.
When you look at events in hindsight, it’s always temptingly easy to claim to be able to connect the dots.
“I encountered it personally when an American woman of Serbian origin found out that I was in the Canadian Forces while we were involved in the ‘Former Yugoslavia’.”
I did a couple of tours in the Balkans with the CF. There’s a line that goes like this:
“Never ask anyone in the Former Yugoslavia why they’re fighting; they’ll tell you.”
Oh, and “Robert of Ottawa”, the Croats, Bosniacs and Serbs blamed just about everyone else for the collapse of Yugoslavia and the subsequent conflict. They notably always ignored the real culprits.
Themselves.
As to this article, what an odd piece.
Why did they put it out on 19 June when the actual date of the assassination was 28 June 1914?
The media can be so cack-handed.
sasquatch “The Brits had learned well the lessons of the Boer War (rifle pits, marksmanship and not wearing Red).”
I have seen discussions (not proof) that the last troops to go into battle wearing red were Canadian troops in the Northwest Rebellion of 1885. Coincidentally the Metis at Batoche and the Indians at Frenchman Butte made extensive use of rifle pits.
I don’t know if he considered himself Canadian or Scottish,as he was from Glasgow.He came here in 1906,so very well may have had intense loyalty to the Old Country. He was awarded the Mons Star,among other medals and was decorated personally by King George in their 1936 Canadian tour,for his work with Veterans.
I never met the man, he died in 1941 from a stroke my Mom always said was caused by the attack on Pearl Harbor.
His health was so bad from wounds sustained in battle that he had to give up his farm,and to his great dismay, it was sold to a Polish fellow who was a German Army veteran.
He was one of the original founders of the Royal Canadian Legion,an Officer in the British Empire Serviceman’s League when they amalgamated into the RCL.
And they did THAT due to government indifference to WW1 veterans, they especially neglected the Indian veterans.
Sasquatch; I knew two veterans of the RCAF who fought in WW2.They both said the British military were quite unfriendly to them,probably out of jealousy,the Canadians were bigger,healthier,and way better paid than the Brits.
But apparently British women were NOT quite so unfriendly,and that was undoubtedly a big part of the problem.
Rizwan, everyone, Britain, Canada, the US, USSR, Germany, Italy had stockpiles of gas. It was never used because there was no perceived usefulness for it. But everyone had it.
You weren’t in it. And there is no reason to think that if you had been of age back then and living in one of the involved countries you would not have found a way to avoid going.
Not only that but “Just Truth” is making assumptions based on being 100 yearson from the events.
There’s no way to know how he might have reacted back then since he would have been an entirely different person.
He might have been one of the first to sign up to “teach the Kaiser a lesson”.
I must be of another world, I read the origins of WW1 were Germanys great science advances in agriculture to compensate their lack of colonies.
The other nomadic creatures in europe held sway..
Article says the 28th, but close enough. I think there’s video of the shot as well believe it or not.
I attended a fascinating lecture about the origins of the First World War earlier this year at the Museum of the Regiments. It’s informative that it took European historians years following the conclusion of the war to ascertain how it had actually started, such was the web of secret alliances and intrigue that entangled Europe before its outbreak. It was by no means inevitable, a colossally tragic string of blunders and misunderstandings.
Would have been interesting to go to a lecture like that. A question I would have asked is why Canada sent any troops there in the first place. A bunch of imperial
powers fighting to keep Germany out of the club and Canada blindly sent her best there to die.
Was this the Museum on Crowchild in Calgary? I was there a while back. Enter in to each Regiments section and the entry had all their dead on the walls. When compared to WW II and Korea the dead in WW I was astounding. I suggest that if Canada, Australia and the USA had stayed home the Euros would have been forced to make peace with Germany. In all likelihood there never would have been a Hitler or a WW II.
There is a reasonably direct path from the end of WWI to just about every tragic event in the last 100 years. If the British and French could have resisted occupying the Middle East, the Arab with the biggest stick would be running the place, Israel wouldn’t exist, and we would have little interest there.
I remember reading in Pierre Burton’s book about Vimy that 80 percent of the Canadians who fought in WW1 were either British born, or the children of British born parents. It was basically an army of ex pat Brits. Canada was an extension of Britain so when Britain went to war, the Kings Canadian subjects didn’t think twice about it. This is why Vimy is so important in the creation of a separate Canadian identity.
A war we should never have been in.
The fact that the seething hatred continues after a century is disturbing. I encountered it personally when an American woman of Serbian origin found out that I was in the Canadian Forces while we were involved in the “Former Yugoslavia”. Her reaction was to say, “Then I have to hate you then”. Sad really.
It became a WW because of the doctrine of sanctity of treaties.
If Britain and Germany had begged off, it would have been over without the enormous bloodshed, followed by WWII. Once the mobilizations of the national armies began, war was inevitable. John Keegan wrote an excellent treatment of it.
Today I feel like the Hillcrest Mine disaster is a more important date to remember.
No, we had the best people of that generation slaughtered because European empires were treading on each others toes.
Writers love to claim that the Nation of Canada was “forged in the fire of Vimy Ridge” or some such romanticism.
All I ever saw was old shell-shocked guys who had the life stripped out of them by that terrible conflict. Most of ’em couldn’t talk about it thirty or forty years later, when we kids would ask what it was like,we’d be greeted by a vacant look and a shaken head,and they’d look down and we knew we shouldn’t have asked.`
Forged a Nation in that slaughterhouse? Not f***ing likely! We killed off the best of our Country for the snits of European imperialists.
My home town had a very high percentage of men volunteer for WW1,and so many we lost were the leaders of the community. When the rest of the best of the next generation was killed off in WW2, few came back,those that survived moved away,and that great little Prairie town is practically a ghost town now.
Sorry if I ranted a bit, but this subject is very near and dear to my heart as so many of my family fought and died in those two wars. My Grandfather was grievously wounded in a WW1 cavalry attack at Mons,and my Dad was never the same after he came home in 1946.
It took the European powers six weeks to decide that war was necessary after Prinzip shot the Archduke.If that event was so bloody important,what took so long?
War
Children
It’s just a shot away
Jagger-Richards
I think you meant that as a response to my comment. I agree with everything that you say about the futility of the war. What meant if I wasn’t clear is that 100 years after the fact we can say they “we” shouldn’t have got involved in “their” war. If you asked someone 100 years ago, they would likely have responded “what do you mean by us, and them, there is only we.” By the end of the war, there was an “us” and “them”, because Canadians had started to think of themselves as Canadians, as opposed to Brits who lived in Canada. When people talk about Vimy, and WW1 in general creating a Canadian identity, that’s what they mean.
And if your Grand dad was wounded in a cavalry charge at Mons, I’m going to guess that it was in 1914, and he was in the British Army. Am I right? Was he Canadian or British, and if he was from Canada, did he consider himself Canadian, or British?
Quite right, Scar. It’s absolutely direct between WWI and everything that’s happened since. The 1920s and ’30s were nothing more than a brief recess between two halves of the same war.
That said, WWI was inevitable. The Great Powers had been just itching for a good thorough squabble among themselves for about a generation. The Kaiser’s vision of Germany’s true place in the world was not all that greatly different from that of a demented Austrian painter.
And because they had not paid the slightest attention to the American Civil War, they operated under the assumption that it would be similar to the Napoleonic campaigns of the early 1800s. Short, swift, decisive, and all over in about 12 weeks. The Franco-Prussian War seemed to confirm this notion. They failed utterly to understand that The Wilderness and Petersburg in 1864 were in fact the true shape of things to come.
Wow. Great comments. Especially Don’s.
It’s June 28. For sure
And cgh. Exactly! The British, French, and Russians had been itching for a fight ever since Bismarck united the German states into one country in the 1860s. They could not stand competition in the global race to acquire colonies.
Yeah that attitude continued long after that….for the same reasons.
My father, a Brit(ne 1905) arrived in ’29 went back briefly in ’39 and was more or less a Brit and I suspect thought the UK had not changed.
He was not convinced by the reports by myself and siblings except he realized the Blitz had mucked things up a bit.
Then 1974, immediately after my mothers passing, he returned to the UK….
I am convinced he landed in Britain a Brit but returned a Canadian…
I suspect the WW1 Canadians got treated as “bloody colonials” and as a result acquired a national identity. Getting patronized and snubbed will inspire an us and them attitude.
I suspect the alleged “Balkan Powderkeg” was a symptom not the cause….the cause was much like the more recent Balkan conflict….they had forgotten what it was like and failed to grasp the nature of modern war…..they had overlooked the US War of Northern Aggression, the Franco-Prussian War and the Battle of Plevna(google it).
The Brits had learned well the lessons of the Boer War (rifle pits, marksmanship and not wearing Red). The Germans had already grasped the role of railways. All had machine guns and failed to realize the problem of the other guy having them too.
The recurring ritual of being prepared to fight the last war had begun.
Typical AP. Photo caption references Sarajevo Yugoslavia. Guess the caption writer skipped history the day they explained that Yugoslavia was formed following WWI
was born an Englishman but have lived in Canada since I was 3. I spent 1 1/2 years with the British Army, as a Canadian, on a training course. I don’t think we were treated as “bloody colonials”, when I was there (mind this was the 1990′).
My response to any Brit who said anything about colonials, and it must have happened because I remember saying it was to point out that the empire was created by those who left the motherland, not those who stayed.
It was the first of 2 senseless wastes of human life orchestrated by profiteers and their political enablers.
The arch Duke got clipped by a hired trigger man working for the new ascending European order. WWI had the agenda to create a power vacuum in central Europe where aristocratic oligarchs were to be displaced by a new financially aligned bureaucratic class – things went as planned after the treaty of Versailles with central Europe fully under the grip of globalist profiteers and Brussels bureaucrats until one of the new Euro-networking politicos got off the plantation and started free lancing for his own profit – then the Euro-elite sucked us back into the war grinder to bail them out again.
Looking at how this global bureaucratic elite have directed the political agenda of western nations in post WW policy, “freedom” was the last thing those two scraps were about. Our political leadership has broken faith with the spirit of those who sacrificed themselves in war because then as now, our freedom remains under bureaucratic attack universally.
The Turks would still be running the Middle East.
That’s because NATO led the ethnic cleansing of Serbs from many parts of the old Yugoslavia. We bombed the wrong people. That’s why there are almost no Christians left in Kosovo and there are a whole lot more mosques and militants in Bosnia(-Herzogovinia)
I disagree that war if futile. It is often necessary. Unpleasant; yes, I don’t disagree there but you have chosen the wrong word.
Valuable insight from Sasquatch, cgh, Occam and others.
Communism in Russia and income taxes in North America were the fallout from the Great War.
OTOH, gas warfare went down after the first war; the Japanese though did employ it during the Sino-Japanese War of 1931-1945 and Saddam employed it c. 1986 onwards.
“There is a reasonably direct path from the end of WWI to just about every tragic event in the last 100 years.”
But you could claim there was a reasonably direct path from the Battle of Waterloo to just about every tragic event in the 100 years leading to WWI. And you could go back every hundred years making the same claim.
When you look at events in hindsight, it’s always temptingly easy to claim to be able to connect the dots.
“I encountered it personally when an American woman of Serbian origin found out that I was in the Canadian Forces while we were involved in the ‘Former Yugoslavia’.”
I did a couple of tours in the Balkans with the CF. There’s a line that goes like this:
“Never ask anyone in the Former Yugoslavia why they’re fighting; they’ll tell you.”
Oh, and “Robert of Ottawa”, the Croats, Bosniacs and Serbs blamed just about everyone else for the collapse of Yugoslavia and the subsequent conflict. They notably always ignored the real culprits.
Themselves.
As to this article, what an odd piece.
Why did they put it out on 19 June when the actual date of the assassination was 28 June 1914?
The media can be so cack-handed.
sasquatch “The Brits had learned well the lessons of the Boer War (rifle pits, marksmanship and not wearing Red).”
I have seen discussions (not proof) that the last troops to go into battle wearing red were Canadian troops in the Northwest Rebellion of 1885. Coincidentally the Metis at Batoche and the Indians at Frenchman Butte made extensive use of rifle pits.
I don’t know if he considered himself Canadian or Scottish,as he was from Glasgow.He came here in 1906,so very well may have had intense loyalty to the Old Country. He was awarded the Mons Star,among other medals and was decorated personally by King George in their 1936 Canadian tour,for his work with Veterans.
I never met the man, he died in 1941 from a stroke my Mom always said was caused by the attack on Pearl Harbor.
His health was so bad from wounds sustained in battle that he had to give up his farm,and to his great dismay, it was sold to a Polish fellow who was a German Army veteran.
He was one of the original founders of the Royal Canadian Legion,an Officer in the British Empire Serviceman’s League when they amalgamated into the RCL.
And they did THAT due to government indifference to WW1 veterans, they especially neglected the Indian veterans.
Sasquatch; I knew two veterans of the RCAF who fought in WW2.They both said the British military were quite unfriendly to them,probably out of jealousy,the Canadians were bigger,healthier,and way better paid than the Brits.
But apparently British women were NOT quite so unfriendly,and that was undoubtedly a big part of the problem.
Rizwan, everyone, Britain, Canada, the US, USSR, Germany, Italy had stockpiles of gas. It was never used because there was no perceived usefulness for it. But everyone had it.
You weren’t in it. And there is no reason to think that if you had been of age back then and living in one of the involved countries you would not have found a way to avoid going.
Not only that but “Just Truth” is making assumptions based on being 100 yearson from the events.
There’s no way to know how he might have reacted back then since he would have been an entirely different person.
He might have been one of the first to sign up to “teach the Kaiser a lesson”.
I must be of another world, I read the origins of WW1 were Germanys great science advances in agriculture to compensate their lack of colonies.
The other nomadic creatures in europe held sway..