VIENNA CAR WHICH CARRIED ARCHDUKE TO HIS DEATH RESULTED IN OUTBREAK OF WORLD WAR I

BY BRIAN OGLE

JUST a few days ago, on Monday, November 11, at exactly 11.00 am – the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month – it was the anniversary of the signing of the Armistice in 1918, thus ending the so-called “War to end all Wars”.

Fittingly, at exactly the same hour I was standing beside the Gräf & Stift open-topped touring car in Vienna’s Military Museum, called The Arsenal, by the very vehicle in which Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife Duchess Sophie were assassinated in Sarajevo by a Bosnian Serb nationalist in June 1914.

The killings was the one single event which not only ignited a European but indeed worldwide conflict between the super powers, and indeed many other less powerful countries who lined up against each other in various alliances. In the weeks that followed the assassinations Europe was divided into two coalitions, the Triple Entente, consisting of France, Russia and Britain, and the Triple Alliance of Germany, Austria Hungary and Italy.

World War I which followed resulted in the mobilisation of 70 million military personnel, including 60 million Europeans, making it the largest war in history. It was also one of the deadliest with an estimated nine million combatant fatalities and another seven million civilian deaths.

In one hall of The Arsenal, visitors can see the Archduke’s automobile in surprisingly pristine condition in which the heir to the throne, and duchess Sophie were killed. The Archduke’s blood-soaked uniform jacket and the chaise longue on which he died are also one display. Apparently the assassin jumped on the running board of the car and shot both dead at close range with a pistol taking just two shots to kill both.

As I stood by the car my thoughts turned to the horrendous carnage that followed the Sarajevo incident, sparking off a chain reaction and worldwide conflagration and death of many millions.

I thought especially of a relative in my own family, my mother’s great uncle, Rifleman George McClure of Hillsborough, County Down, who died from his wounds after being hit while on sentry duty in Flanders Fields, just outside Ypres, just a few months before the First World War ended.

He lies in Canada Farm Cemetery alongside five other 36th Ulster Division soldiers, who all died in the third Battle of Ypres, in the last German offensive of the War, in what apparently was the Kaiser’s last throw of the dice….

I have been to Canada Farm many times, and indeed there is a brass memorial plaque to Rifleman McClure in St George’s Church in Ypres, so that he will not be forgotten among the poppy fields of Flanders, but far from home and his native rolling green fields of County Down.

But it was sobering indeed to stand beside the car which carried the Archduke to his death but which ultimately led to the untimely end of millions and millions worldwide…. including so many from this small part of the British Isles.