In Europe

of the nation. The first would-be assassin was afraid to open fire; the second decided that, on second thoughts, he had no desire to spatter Sophie's blindingly white dress with blood; the third was clever enough to take up a position right beside a policeman. He did, however, throw his hand grenade. Panic broke out, a few people were wounded, the crown prince and his wife remained unharmed. Princip, who was waiting a little further along, was disappointed and went to drink a cup of coffee.
    At the town hall Franz Ferdinand flew into a rage, especially when he noticed that the text of his speech had been spattered with blood. A little later, at Sophie's suggestion, they decided to drive to the hospital to visit the wounded. But the chauffeur was not informed of the change of plans. The delegation drove back down the quay, and turned the corner onto Franz Josef Street. ‘Wrong!’ shouted the Bosnian governor, who was also in the car. The chauffeur tried to backup, the car stalled for a moment. Of all the infernal luck, precisely at the spot where Gavrilo Princip happened to be standing. He jumped onto the running board, shot Franz Ferdinand, then pointed his Browning at the governor, but the second bullet hit Sophie, who was bent over her husband.
    ‘The crown prince was hit precisely in an artery,’ I read in the coroner's report, printed in the
Neue Freie Presse
of 3 July, 1914.‘Had the bullet entered a little further to the left or to the right, the damage would never have been fatal. As a physician, I can only conclude that the bullet struck him there more or less by accident. There was no way Princip could have aimed so carefully. That is also to be seen from the fact that the first bullet went through the side of the automobile before striking the crown princess.’
    ‘It was Sunday, I was a student,’ Joseph Roth wrote. ‘That afternoon a girl came by. They wore their hair in braids back then. She was carrying abig, yellow straw hat, it was imbued with summer and reminded me of hay, crickets and poppies. The hat contained a telegram, the first extra edition I had ever seen, crumpled, terrifying, a lightning bolt of paper. “You know,” said the girl, “they've killed the crown prince. My father came home from the café. We're not staying here, are we?”
    ‘Eighteen months later – how durable love was in times of peace! – she was standing there, she too, amid the clouds of smoke, along the rails at Freight Station 2, the music braying incessantly, train carriages grating, engines screaming, little shivering women hanging like wilted wreaths on the green men, the new uniforms still smelling of the tailors’ blocks, we were a company on the march, destination secret, probably Serbia … Her father never went to the café again; he was already lying in a mass grave.’

Chapter SEVEN
Ypres
    TUESDAY, 9 FEBRUARY, 1999. ACROSS THE FLATS BEHIND DIKSMUIDE , the sky is full of snow. The clouds do not come blowing in but rise up from the land, like a broad, black wall. Behind me the sun is still shining, bright light on the mud in the fields, on the snow in the furrows, the handful of red houses, the steeples in the distance. At the same time, the landscape has something austere about it. Take out a few electric pylons, a couple of pig farms, and you have a battlefield again.
    Imagine, I'm a British soldier, we've crossed the Channel in rollicking good cheer, and now here we march: ‘Let the war come, here we are, here we are, here we are at last!’ One of our captains writes home: ‘I love war. It's like a big picnic, but without the pointlessness of a picnic.’ The Germans have moved through Belgium into northern France, but the French have cut them off at the Marne. Now we are going to do the same, in West Flanders.
    How would I feel then?
    In 1999, there were still some hundred and fifty very old Britons left to talk about it. In November 1998, at the eightieth anniversary of the war's end, I saw them march through London, using canes, sitting in wheelchairs, then came the veterans of Dunkirk, D-Day and the Falklands, then the nurses and the ‘walking wounded’, two, three generations went by, full of blood-soaked ideals and virtues.
    A brittle Jack Rogers (b.1895) told BBC television: ‘We had no idea where we were going. But at a certain point we saw flashes in the distance. Then we began hearing noises: thunderclaps, heavier all the time. And then suddenly we realised: we are going into a