In later years, men and women on both sides of the Atlantic remembered
the early summer of 1914 as a moment marked by a particular brightness.
For both the leaders and those they tried to lead, it was a time of beautiful
weather for all and of leisure for many. The season's first day, June 2 1 , found
Kaiser Wilhelm II touring northern Germany. His appearances at agricultural
fairs and military maneuvers were scheduled to bring him shortly to
the annual Elbe Regatta he so much enjoyed. Archduke Franz Ferdinand,
heir to the throne of Austria-Hungary, and his wife. Countess Sophie, were
visiting their favorite Bohemian castle at Chlumetz. Across the Atlantic the
budding young American intellectual Walter Lippmann stayed at a cabin in
the Maine woods, writing an analysis of labor problems for ex-president
Theodore Roosevelt. In Paris, the Spanish artist Pablo Picasso, who had
recently shifted his endeavors from painting to sculpture, was planning a
vacation trip to southern France. In Vienna, Dr. Sigmund Freud was preparing
for his July vacation at the Bohemian spa city of Carlsbad, and General
Helmuth von Moltke, the chief of staff of the German army, expected to be
there as well. In Munich, a young fugitive from conscription, Adolf Hitler,
who had fled only a year before from his Austrian homeland, was scratching
out a living by painting advertising posters. Since May, the Russian revolutionary
Vladimir I. Lenin had been on vacation at Poronin, a village in the
Tatra Mountains of Austrian Poland located near the Russian border. A little
more than a year earlier, he had dismissed the possibility of a major war:
"A war between Austria and Russia would be a very useful thing for the
revolution in all of Eastern Europe, but it is not likely that Franz Joseph [the
emperor of Austria-Hungary] and Nikolashka ["Nicky," the tsar of Russia]
will give us that pleasure."! Meanwhile, in the Bosnian capital of Sarajevo,
a Serb teenager named Gavrilo Princip, along with a coterie of fellow
conspirators, counted the days until they could make a risky and inauspicious
attempt to murder Franz Ferdinand.
On June 28, when the summer was only a week old, Franz Ferdinand and
Sophie lay dead in Sarajevo, while Princip, their assassin, was in police
custody. The crisis of 1914, whose results would darken the next four years
and haunt the decades following, had begun.
World History
