| Friday marks the anniversary of what might have been the most fateful second chance in history. On June 28, 1914, a dejected would-be assassin was standing on a street in Sarajevo when his target, the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, materialized in a car right in front of him. The killer, a Serbian extremist named Gavrilo Princip, had watched his accomplices botch a bombing attempt earlier that morning—and, faced with Archduke Franz Ferdinand’s coincidental appearance shortly before noon, he didn’t miss. In 2004, The New Yorker’s Adam Gopnik revisited the aftermath: the military alliances that were activated and the cataclysmic carnage that ensued. In six weeks, Gopnik wrote, Europe shifted from “a long peace to mutual massacre,” a confrontation that became known—naïvely, it turned out—as “the war to end all wars.” During the first month alone, more than a quarter million French soldiers were killed; on the Western Front, where all was not quiet, more than three million people lost their lives, in a fight for a line that moved “scarcely five miles” in three years. Gopnik examines the mentality and technologies of the combatants, debunking some commonly held theories (America’s entry may not have been pivotal to the war’s outcome) and reassigning some of the blame. He explains why modern medicine and the advent of canned food might have contributed, paradoxically, to the deaths of more men, whose numbers included sons of Oscar Wilde, Rudyard Kipling, and Britain’s Prime Minister. Historians still debate the First World War’s meaning, but one lesson about large-scale conflicts seems clear. “They produce results,” Gopnik reflects, “that we can hardly imagine when they start.” | 
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