December 1959
On June 28th, 1914, seven young men took up positions on an avenue in Sarajevo, then the capital of Bosnia, with the intention of assassinating Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the throne of Austria-Hungary. The Archduke and his wife were in an open car - both were shot and died. There must be many people now for whom the word Sarajevo tolls no sound of doom - for whom archdukes are operatic luxuries - the distance of Sarajevo a matter of hours, and assassinations are generally associated with some kind of mass gang warfare or racial prejudice. It is therefore exactly the right moment for a clear and detailed account of the events leading up to and away from the murder which touched off the first World War. Professor Remak seems to have taken a great deal of intelligent trouble about them, both from his excellent portraits of the main characters, and his exposition of the wide, rotting and frightening scene in which they are set, the assassination seems not only unsurprising, but inevitable, and one is really only astonished that it did not occur earlier. The book is an extraordinary picture of transition between King Lear and bullet-proof cars, and is worth reading.