In Europe

the drum came for his father.
    ‘We didn't have the slightest expectation of war,’ Joseph Roth wrote of spring 1914. ‘That month of May in the city of Vienna floated in the littlesilver-edged cups of coffee, drifted over the table linen, the narrow staffs of chocolate crammed with filling, the red and green millefeuilles that looked like exquisite jewels, and suddenly chief councillor Sorgsam blurted out, right in the middle of the month of May: “Gentlemen, there will now be war!”’
    The main storyline is well known: how the Austro-Hungarian crown prince and his wife pay a state visit to Sarajevo, on Vidov Dan of all days, the day the Serbs commemorate each year their defeat at Turkish hands in Kosovo in 1389; the fatal shooting; the arrest of the ‘terrorist’, the nineteen-year-old Bosnian-Serb nationalist Gavrilo Princip; Austria's list of humiliating demands to Serbia; Russia supporting ‘brother nation’ Serbia in its refusal; Germany siding automatically with Austria; France adhering to its alliance with Russia; Great Britain's fruitless attempts to mediate; the chain reaction of mobilisations which neither the czar nor the two emperors could bring to a halt; the fate that had an impact on the lives of almost all Europeans.
    It was a war that started in the poor, peasant corner of south-eastern Europe, but took on its horror and vastness only with the participation of every major Western industrialised nation. It was a war that sloshed back and forth like waves in a basin: the trigger lay in the East, the escalation in the West, but the greatest destruction ultimately occurred, again, in the East.
    Throughout almost all those years of war, the West was split by a long, stubborn front that stretched through Flanders and along the Franco-German border. In the East, the Germans were able to break through quite quickly; there, another front had been drawn through the middle of Poland. At first, that was the case in the Balkans as well: Austrian troops took Belgrade in late 1915. Then their advance ground to a halt, due in part to fierce Serb resistance in Macedonia. The Italians, too, put up a bitter struggle against the Austrians, their losses almost equalling those of the British. No less than eleven major battles were fought in the Alps, and Caporetto (present-day Kobarid in Slovenia) became a sort of Italian Verdun: there, between October 1915 and September 1917, more than 300,000 soldiers were killed or wounded. The Mediterranean was in the hands of the French and British navies, and in spring 1915 the British tried to invade Gallipoli in order to break through to Constantinople byway of the Dardanelles. Their plan was to create a single Allied-Russian front, but the attack on Austria and Germany's ‘soft white underbelly’ failed.
    Irfan Orga's little world was demolished within the year. Uncle Ahmet went missing in the Syrian desert. Aunt Aysşe died of a broken heart. The family's house burned down, taking with it all the family's hoarded capital. Irfan's father died during the forced marches to the Dardanelles. The family sank into poverty. The children ended up at boarding schools, Irfan ate grass to still his hunger, his mother slipped into madness. Only Grandmother Orga remained on her feet, hardened, old, tough as nails.
    Gavrilo Princip was too young to be executed. Instead, he wasted away after four years in a cell in the Little Fort at Theresienstadt, later used as a Nazi transit camp in the 1940s. In retrospect, his prison psychiatrist reported, he was stunned by what his action had precipitated. He had been furious about the boorish Austrian annexation of the former Turkish province of Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1908. He had been bitter about his country's backwardness and poverty. That was all that was on his mind; except, of course and above all, a glorious and heroic death for himself.
    Europe seemed to tumble into this war almost accidentally. During summer 1914, in almost every country one noted a sort of blithe patriotism, a sense of ‘stop and fix it’, a minor blip in a glorious age of welfare and progress. ‘Back for Christmas’ was the British motto. In Berlin, the kaiser told his soldiers that they would be home again ‘before the leaves have fallen’. The cafés were full of happy faces, and people stood up and clinked their glasses together whenever the national anthem, ‘Heil dir im Siegerkranz’, was played. Café Piccadilly was quickly rechristened the Vaterland