The Great War

Location: East Wing

The Great War started in a car.

On June 24, 1914, Austria-Hungary’s Archduke Franz Ferdinand was touring one of the Empire’s holdings, Sarajevo, in a 1910 Graf & Stift Bois de Boulogne tourer. While driving through the city, Serbian nationalists repeatedly attacked the car in a brazen attempt to free Sarajevo from more than 600 years of occupation. Again and again, the Archduke’s chauffeur Leopold Lojka thwarted assassins with his driving. The fatal attack occurred when Lojka made a wrong turn and had trouble getting the car into reverse.
 
The assassination of Franz Ferdinand, like the entire war to follow, resulted from long-simmering conflicts dating to the Middle Ages colliding with an increasingly mechanical world. The international problems were well understood, but this new automated world was not. Automobiles, airplanes and even machine guns were all less than 50 years old, yet they were about to be pressed into service to solve almost ancient problems.
 
By 1918, the world had been remade. Empires fell, new ones formed. The age of the horse was over, while the age of engines had begun its inexorable ascent.