"On June 28, 1914 a tubercular nineteen-year-old Bosnian youth named Gavrilo Princip carried out one of the most successful terrorist acts in all history. The shots he fired that day not only severed fatally the jugular vein of the Archduke Francis Ferdinand, the Habsburg heir to the thrones of Austria and Hungary. They also precipitated a war that destroyed the Austro-Hungarian Empire and transformed Bosnia-Herzegovina from one of its colonies into a part of a new South Slav state. These were in fact more or less precisely the things Princip had hoped to achieve, even if he cannot have anticipated such far-reaching success. Yet these were only the intended consequences of his action. The war he triggered was not confined to the Balkans; it also drew broad and hideous scars across northern Europe and the Near East. Like gargantuan abattoirs, its battlefields sucked in and slaughtered young men from all the extremities of the globe, claiming in all nearly ten million lives. It brought forth new and terrible methods of destruction, hitherto the stuff of Wellsian science-fiction: cavalry charges by armed and armoured vehicles, lethal clouds of poison gas, invisible fleets of submarines. It rained down bombs from the air and cluttered the Atlantic seabed with sunken ships. It lasted longer than any major war in Europe in living memory, dragging on for four and a quarter years. And, besides the Habsburgs, it toppled three other imperial dynasties: the Romanovs, the Hohenzollerns and the Ottomans. Even when an armistice was proclaimed, the war refused to stop; it swept eastwards after 1918, as if eluding the grasp of the peacemakers."