Everybody knows how the World War One started. Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria, heir to the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and his wife Sophie were assassinated in Sarajevo on 28 June 1914 by Gavrilo Princip, one of several young fanatics involved in the plot.
This incident set in train a series of events which culminated in a declaration of war by Austria-Hungary, followed by seventeen million deaths and a similar number of wounded men (including my father, Private Horace Briggs, on the Somme, 1916).
The curious fact that remains unknown is that the assassins, far from making it up as they went along, were following a detailed blueprint spelt out in a story by a minor Russian writer called Leonid Andreyev (1871-1919).
This man enjoyed a meteoric but short-lived career as the author of sensational stories, and ended where he had begun, in obscurity and poverty, with a blaze of celebrity and misspent riches in between.
His finest work, by far, was The Story of the Seven who were Hanged (1908), here shortened to Seven Hanged, a personal response to Leo Tolstoy’s anti-capital-punishment pamphlet of 1906, I Cannot be Silent.
Andreyev believed he could move more hearts by pungent story-telling than any amount of preaching, and so it turned out.
This tale, strongly influenced by the antics of real anarchists of the day, is nothing less than a dress-rehearsal for the Sarajevo assassination.
In the story, five idealistic young revolutionaries plan to assassinate a government minister. Arriving at the appointed spot, armed with bombs and guns, they are arrested (having been betrayed), placed before a court, found guilty and sentenced to death by hanging.
In gaol they are joined by two condemned common criminals, and the story follows the behaviour and mental processes of all seven as they move towards inevitable death at the end of a rope.
Andreyev miraculously excelled himself.
Somehow he managed to personalise the seven destinies, drawing down upon the condemned prisoners far more understanding and sympathy than blame – whatever they had done – and exposing the atrocity of judicial execution.
Make no mistake. Even today, more than a century on, this story will not fail to move new readers, giving many of them strong pause for thought, especially in those parts of the ‘civilised’ world where the barbarous and blundering practice of slaughtering our fellow-citizens is still carried out.
- The Book that Started World War One
This incident set in train a series of events which culminated in a declaration of war by Austria-Hungary, followed by seventeen million deaths and a similar number of wounded men (including my father, Private Horace Briggs, on the Somme, 1916).
The curious fact that remains unknown is that the assassins, far from making it up as they went along, were following a detailed blueprint spelt out in a story by a minor Russian writer called Leonid Andreyev (1871-1919).
This man enjoyed a meteoric but short-lived career as the author of sensational stories, and ended where he had begun, in obscurity and poverty, with a blaze of celebrity and misspent riches in between.
His finest work, by far, was The Story of the Seven who were Hanged (1908), here shortened to Seven Hanged, a personal response to Leo Tolstoy’s anti-capital-punishment pamphlet of 1906, I Cannot be Silent.
Andreyev believed he could move more hearts by pungent story-telling than any amount of preaching, and so it turned out.
This tale, strongly influenced by the antics of real anarchists of the day, is nothing less than a dress-rehearsal for the Sarajevo assassination.
In the story, five idealistic young revolutionaries plan to assassinate a government minister. Arriving at the appointed spot, armed with bombs and guns, they are arrested (having been betrayed), placed before a court, found guilty and sentenced to death by hanging.
In gaol they are joined by two condemned common criminals, and the story follows the behaviour and mental processes of all seven as they move towards inevitable death at the end of a rope.
Andreyev miraculously excelled himself.
Somehow he managed to personalise the seven destinies, drawing down upon the condemned prisoners far more understanding and sympathy than blame – whatever they had done – and exposing the atrocity of judicial execution.
Make no mistake. Even today, more than a century on, this story will not fail to move new readers, giving many of them strong pause for thought, especially in those parts of the ‘civilised’ world where the barbarous and blundering practice of slaughtering our fellow-citizens is still carried out.
- The Book that Started World War One
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