how a sandwich started the great war

The place that can not be. Ypres. The Great War. Naked, branchless trees stand like solitary sentinels against a hostile sky. The mud colours friend and foe alike, the ground a pockmarked labyrinth of trenches. A generation dead already, fresh-faced innocents sent out to die in battle. A quarter million dead and it has only just begun. The air turns poisonous, the first whiffs of a chemical warfare so horrible it scars souls and lungs and eats out eyes. Another hundred thousand dead and the survivors drench their scarves with urine and wrap them around their faces. The shelling never stops, it turns people into bugs, crawling and digging in the ground. Deeper and deeper they dig, to hide from the vengeful thunder above. The rains keep falling and the whistle blows, tired feet climb out of the trenches stumbling towards the guns that are waiting for them. The mud swallows them without a trace and the rats eat the rest. A week later over half a million more have died; slaughtered in a battle condemned as meaningless even in its own time.

The Great War. Ypres. Over eight hundred thousand dead during four years of fighting over a small patch of land, a single town in a world-spanning war. The place that can not be. How is a place like that even possible? Is it Hell? There is no fire in my hell, no demons with pitchforks. There is mud, and barbed wire and burning eyes and lungs. There is industrial death turned into nightmares so horrible that few dare remember them. I put my book down and walk into the kitchen. I am feeling peckish, and there, as I stand in my green fleece robe and make a sandwich, my path once more crosses with the past. I am struck by the insanity of it all, that the simple act of getting a sandwich could spur something as completely unbelievably horrible as the battle of Ypres. A sandwich would trigger hell on earth.

It was almost a hundred years ago. In Sarajevo. An important man in an open car parades the street, a Kennedy of the day perhaps, an Archduke with a beautiful wife visiting to celebrate the opening of a hospital. In the crowd hide seven young men, members of the Black Hand. Poor and desperate agitators, they are armed with guns and grenades, and out to change the world. Some claim they were sponsored by French freemasons, some that they simply were in it for the nationalistic glory. A martyr’s death on cyanide and royal blood. A grenade is thrown, but the Archduke bats it away and it bounces off to explode underneath another car in the cortege. People are injured, the crowd screams in panic, and the would-be martyr swallows his cyanide pill and makes a run for the river. But martyrdom is never easy, and the cyanide is old enough to make him vomit bile all over the street. The river has no mercy, being only inches deep in summertime, and he is caught and dragged ashore. An amateur attempt by amateur assassins and the Archduke speeds away.

But this story does not end with a speedy escape. People were wounded and appearances have to be upheld, so after venting his ire on the Mayor, the Archduke decides to visit the victims at the hospital. He is there for goodwill after all, and people have been hurt because of his presence in the city. But, clearly people are out to kill him, so what would be the wiser cause of action? There are soldiers on manoeuvre just outside the city limits, but since they lack the requisite dress uniforms they are not brought in. Appearances must be kept. Instead it is decided to abandon the planned route, and just drive as fast as possible to the hospital. If nobody knows where the Archduke is, nobody can try to kill him. Unfortunately the driver was amongst those kept in the dark, and in addition, he was a man who did not know the town very well. So, bereft of preparations and instructions, he takes a wrong turn down a backstreet.

This is when paths cross once more, probabilities climbing towards the unreasonable. Back in Sarajevo one of the Black Hand, a young man named Gavrilo Princip, has waited a long time for the Archduke. But, as the rumours of the first failed attempt start to circulate, he decides that he has probably lost his chance. There is no way the Archduke is going to continue with his parade through the city, and as lunchtime approaches he starts feeling peckish. Gun hidden safely inside his coat, he walks over to a sidewalk café to get himself a sandwich. He is sitting there, in his chair with his sandwich, when a fancy car pulls into the street. It takes a moment for him to recognize the Archduke’s car, but it is hard to miss the uniformed man arguing with his driver that he has taken a wrong turn. Princip drops his sandwich and grabs his gun, then steps out into the street to make history.

The driver spots the man as he walks out with gun raised, pistol-whipping a nearby pedestrian that happened to be in the way. He tries to back up the car, but stressed as he is he messes up the pedals, the gears lock and the car stalls. Gavrilo Princip fires two shots. The first hits the Archduke in the neck, the second hits his wife in the abdomen as she instinctively throws her body across her husband’s to try to protect him. They both die before reaching the hospital. Princip’s cyanide capsule also fails to work; he is arrested and later sentenced to 20 years in jail as he is too young to be executed. This was 28th of June, 1914, and is considered the start of the Great War.

The first battle of Ypres was 18th of October the same year. The two events are separated by less than four months. That was all it took for the world to go from understandable to nightmarish. Four months. A dead Archduke. A peckish assassin. A lost driver. A half-eaten sandwich. Paths cross, like ships in the night, and we find ourselves in places we never thought we would be. Places that should not be, that can not be. A dead end street outside a café. A battlefield littered with the dead. In the kitchen I put my sandwich down.

I have suddenly lost my appetite.