The World to end all Wars has been traced back to the actions of Gavrilo Princip who with two friends set out to try to improve the lives of his countrymen, knowing that his success would lead to his own death. He had planned to shoot himself at the end of his mission, and if that failed to take a cyanide capsule. However first he had a mission to carry out, killing Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the 51-year-old nephew of the ailing Emperor Franz Joseph and heir presumptive to the Austro-Hungarian throne. Gavrilo claimed not to intend to kill the wife of Franz Ferdinand, the Duchess Sophie Chotek who due to a series of procedural issues was not usually allowed to travel next to the Duke.

The death of Franz Ferdinand is seen as the catalyst for the War, but it is impossible to disconnect the circumstances of the assassination from the attempt to murder Franz Joseph 4 years earlier by Bogdan Žerajić, a 22-year-old Serb medical student from Herzegovina. This attempt was unsuccessful and led to Bogdans death. According to the limited information from 100 years ago Gavrilo “often spent whole nights [at the grave of Žerajić], thinking about our situation, about our miserable conditions… and so it was that I resolved to carry out the assassination.”

The causes of World War 1 are many and various. The impact of the one failed and one successful assassination are clearly significant and perhaps point to the importance of maintaining a united Europe, despite the frustrations of our current political leaders. However barely a month before the start of the War, Kaiser Wilhelm II was in Kiel inspecting German and British warships after the reopening of the canal. It was reported that at 5pm all the ships in the harbour hoisted the Austro-Hungarian flag at half mast, including the British warships to acknowledge the death of the Archduke and Duchess.

The tragedy of the miserable conditions which faced Gavrilo and his two companions on 28th June 2014 cannot be blamed for the mass murder that began 5 weeks later. Yet the extent to which we fail to address the poverty and misery in the lifes of todays teenagers and their families has the potential to sow seeds of future conflict in ways we cannot imagine. The reason why the Archduke was in Sarajevo on Sunday June 28 1914 was because it is St Vitus’s Day, the anniversary of the Battle of Kosovo on the ‘Field of Blackbirds’ in 1389, in which the Ottomans annihilated the Serbs. It remained a day of profound significance to all Serb nationalists. If we are to associate the death of Flanders field with the two bullets in Gavrilo’s gun, it is important to also make the connection to the misery in which he and his companions lived in and the annihilation of the Serbs 525 years earlier. It is hard to make a justification for war, and those with the power to order troops onto the frontline need to be held accountable for their actions. We also need to ensure we offer a great deal more hope to our 19 year olds than Gavrilo experienced in his tragic life.