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COMMENT |
The financial chaos of the past months has underlined one theme which has struck me consistently: the powerlessness of the ordinary individual to affect events, or, indeed, have any control outside the narrow confines of home and family. The one historical event, above all, which highlights this sense of powerlessness is the outbreak of the First World War. The well-known story of the assassination on 28 June 1914 of an Austro-Hungarian Archduke in the Balkans escalating in just over a month to a great European War has fascinated me for more years than I care to remember. I have reconstructed the Cabinet debates in London on the weekend of 2-3 August 1914 in minute detail but, always at the back of my mind, was the thought that, on that summer weekend, ordinary people were going about their business, little knowing that decisions being taken in the Cabinet Rooms and Chancelleries of Europe would condemn millions of them to death.