An annual reminder (2019): Forgotten fields in Flanders on Armistice (Veterans) Day.

In 2018 the annual renewal of Veterans Day was auspicious because it marked the 100th anniversary of the Great War's end. Since the conflict's centenary in 2014, there have been 100-year memories of battles and events, from the Masurian Lakes through Meuse-Argonne.

Why is this important?

Among other reasons, Americans remember 11/11/11 each year in the form of a holiday that has come to embrace the service of all veterans, not only those from the now wholly passed World War I generation.

Veterans Day is an official United States holiday honoring armed service veterans. It is a federal holiday that is observed on November 11th. It coincides with other holidays such as Armistice Day or Remembrance Day, which are celebrated in other parts of the world and also mark the anniversary of the signing of the Armistice that ended World War I. (Major hostilities of World War I were formally ended at the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month of 1918 with the German signing of the Armistice.)

November 9 was the 30th anniversary of the day the Berlin Wall began falling. As I'm fond of arguing, the armistice in 1918 didn't end the first war at all. The demise of the Wall did -- well, maybe so. I believe future historians will refer to the period of 1912-1989 as the "77 Years' War," or perhaps tack on another decade and pronounce the 87 Years' War as concluding with the bombardment of Belgrade by NATO.

Speaking for myself, America's Civil War has been a fascination since childhood, and had I hazarded a guess back in 2010 or so, it would have been that the Civil War's sesquicentennial (observed during the years 2011 - 2015) would have gripped me.

To an extent it did, but I should have known better. Europe has been an obsession for thirty-five years of my adult life.

What's more, there's an immediacy. My grandfather was drafted into the Army circa 1918, but fortunately never left the continental United States before WWI ended. His son, who was my father, volunteered and joined the Marines in 1942, spending three years in the Pacific theater of operations.

I didn't do anything, apart from studying their experiences and visiting the European locales neither of them ever saw.

Lessons from history 100 years after the Armistice (The Economist)

The guns fell silent a century ago

 ... National chauvinisms live on despite the Somme. Anti-Semitism lives on despite the Holocaust. Societies’ capacity to imagine collapse and barbarism in visceral terms fades with time. All Europeans can do is be vigilant and humble before these forces, dip their oars into the waves of history when possible, hold tight to their humanity and be grateful that their continent’s past and present are now broadly in harmony, the former educating and civilising the latter, for now at least. Like train lines running together in a wood.

Having visited Gdansk in Poland in 2018, these reflections seem particularly relevant.

For millions of Europeans, the war did not end in 1918, by Natalie Nougayrède (The Guardian)

Our narrative of the armistice is not the only one. In the east conflict continued, fuelled by the crumbling of empires

 ... For one thing, 1918 as the date of the end of the conflict only holds true for the western front. In the east of Europe, the crumbling of empires, the Russian revolution, civil war and the struggle to establish the borders of newly established states all meant that armed violence continued, leaving deep scars.

Here is a guest column originally published in the pre-merger Tribune on November 5, 2009. I repeat it annually.

---

Forgotten fields in Flanders.

Lately I keep hearing this tune.

Keep the home fires burning,
While your hearts are yearning,
Though your lads are far away
They dream of home.

These dreaming lads were soldiers, in route across the English Channel to fight for the United Kingdom, and several hundred thousand of them failed to return home to nostalgically remember a popular song written to inspire the home front in their absence.

By now it should be clear that war is horrible, and I’m not sure that it serves any purpose to discuss which wars are “just.” Justice in this context inevitably owes to situational morality as the combatants pray to their respective deities and make theological mockery of whatever religious interpretation devolves from these biased, selective judgments.

By all such standards, the Great War was especially horrible. The specific horror of this conflict, which eventually came to be known as World War I out of a contextual necessity to keep our historical accountings of human suffering clearly ordered, surely represents societal innocence shattered on an unfathomably massive scale.

An entire generation that had known no war outside of mock duels and parlor games willingly marched off to slaughter while gaily singing songs about honor and glory, and consequently, it’s a safe bet that World War I was the last disastrous conflict to feature a soundtrack entirely devoid of irony. Western societies would have to wait decades and refine techniques of amplification until the onset of thrash metal’s inherent violence finally provided music capable of approximating the grim reality of institutionalized murder.

Earlier this year, the last British veteran of the war died. Perhaps one American soldier of the era remains alive – and, in the time it has taken for me to write this essay, perhaps he’s gone, too. The war began in 1914, and it has long since faded into the black and white images of crude newsreel footage that only hint at the carnage of trench warfare and the doltish, outmoded “leadership” on the part of uniformed war criminals.

Providentially, my own grandfather was drafted too late for combat duty. He managed the not inconsiderable task of avoiding the flu pandemic that killed more American soldiers than enemy fire. My father then followed suit by serving in the Marines during World War II, which was “his” war, and a subject of fascination for him the remainder of his life.

I, too, went overseas, although not in uniform. In 1987, I found myself in Sopron, Hungary, choosing a beautiful early summer’s day to go for a hike in the hills. I came upon a large, older cemetery, and decided to walk through it, ascending a gentle, wooded slope past contemporary gravestones of the still-extant Communist era.

Like rings on a tree stump, history’s reverse chronology rotated as I continued uphill. Nearing the top, rows of Great War graves finally commenced. These were the soldiers who fought and died for the ruling family of the Austro-Hungarian Empire – the losers, as it were, who died as readily as the “winners” on the other side.

The first death dates were more recent: 1918, and then somewhat more from 1917, and as I scanned their names, the majority Hungarian, but also some Germanic and Slavic owing to the mutli-ethnic, polyglot nature of the Habsburg domain – as I contemplated how ridiculously, stupidly youthful so many of them were – I reached the lip of the hill, rather puzzled that there seemed to be no graves from earlier war years.

The answer to my befuddlement was just on the other side. Dipping into a valley studded with older, larger hardwoods, row after row of markers told the lethal tale: Died in 1916, 1915 and 1914.

I always think about the cemetery in Sopron on Veterans Day, formerly Armistice Day, which originally fell on November 11th because that's when the fighting stopped in 1918, ending the First Great World War and enabling a “peace” conference in Versailles that did so much to ensure a second.

Previous generations knew about the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month, but all the other mass bloodlettings since required a consolidation of observance, and a holiday more intrinsically American. So be it, and I’m not here to disagree, even if we forget the first causes that brought it about.

However, we’re left with those many innocent, misplaced songs. Now that living memory has passed, they speak even more eloquently about life, death and our capacity, sometimes successful, and often not, to make sense out of the insensible.

A CBS television documentary, World War One, ran from 1964-65, comprising 26 half-hour episodes, and later airing on cable. My friend Barrie videotaped them. The series is now available on DVD (you can see excerpts on YouTube), and I’m weighing a Christmas purchase, because one of the episodes, “Tipperary and All That Jazz,” has haunted me since the first time he and I watched it around the time of my Sopron sojourn.

Ancient film, much of it depicting camp life behind the lines, forms a backdrop for song snippets. They are melancholy, sentimental and elegiac. It is heartbreaking … and very real.

There's a long, long trail a-winding
Into the land of my dreams,
Where the nightingales are singing,
And a white moon beams.
There's a long, long night of waiting
Until my dreams all come true,
Till the day when I'll be going
Down that long, long trail with you.

An annual reminder: Forgotten fields in Flanders on Armistice (Veterans) Day.

In 2018, the annual renewal of Veterans Day is auspicious because it's the 100th anniversary of the Great War's end. Since the conflict's centenary in 2014, there have been 100-year memories of battles and events, from the Masurian Lakes through Meuse-Argonne.

Why is this important?

Among other reasons, Americans remember 11/11/11 each year in the form of a holiday that has come to embrace the service of all veterans, not only those from the now wholly passed World War I generation.

Veterans Day is an official United States holiday honoring armed service veterans. It is a federal holiday that is observed on November 11th. It coincides with other holidays such as Armistice Day or Remembrance Day, which are celebrated in other parts of the world and also mark the anniversary of the signing of the Armistice that ended World War I. (Major hostilities of World War I were formally ended at the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month of 1918 with the German signing of the Armistice.)

November 9 was the 29th anniversary of the day the Berlin Wall fell. As I'm fond of arguing, the armistice in 1918 didn't end the first war at all. The demise of the Wall did -- well, maybe.

I believe future historians will refer to the period of 1912-1989 as the "77 Years' War," or perhaps tack on another decade and pronounce the 87 Years' War as concluding with the bombardment of Belgrade by NATO.

Speaking for myself, America's Civil War has been a fascination since childhood, and had I hazarded a guess back in 2010 or so, it would have been that the Civil War's sesquicentennial (observed during the years 2011 - 2015) would have gripped me.

To an extent it did, but I should have known better. Europe has been an obsession for thirty-five years of my adult life.

What's more, there's an immediacy. My grandfather was drafted into the Army circa 1918, but fortunately never left the continental United States before WWI ended. His son, who was my father, volunteered and joined the Marines in 1942, spending three years in the Pacific theater of operations.

I didn't do anything, apart from studying their experiences and visiting the European locales neither of them ever saw.

Lessons from history 100 years after the Armistice (The Economist)

The guns fell silent a century ago

 ... National chauvinisms live on despite the Somme. Anti-Semitism lives on despite the Holocaust. Societies’ capacity to imagine collapse and barbarism in visceral terms fades with time. All Europeans can do is be vigilant and humble before these forces, dip their oars into the waves of history when possible, hold tight to their humanity and be grateful that their continent’s past and present are now broadly in harmony, the former educating and civilising the latter, for now at least. Like train lines running together in a wood.

Having just returned from a visit to Gdansk in Poland, these reflections seem particularly relevant.

For millions of Europeans, the war did not end in 1918, by Natalie Nougayrède (The Guardian)

Our narrative of the armistice is not the only one. In the east conflict continued, fuelled by the crumbling of empires

 ... For one thing, 1918 as the date of the end of the conflict only holds true for the western front. In the east of Europe, the crumbling of empires, the Russian revolution, civil war and the struggle to establish the borders of newly established states all meant that armed violence continued, leaving deep scars.

Here is a guest column originally published in the pre-merger Tribune on November 5, 2009. I repeat it annually.

---

Forgotten fields in Flanders.

Lately I keep hearing this tune.

Keep the home fires burning,
While your hearts are yearning,
Though your lads are far away
They dream of home.

These dreaming lads were soldiers, in route across the English Channel to fight for the United Kingdom, and several hundred thousand of them failed to return home to nostalgically remember a popular song written to inspire the home front in their absence.

By now it should be clear that war is horrible, and I’m not sure that it serves any purpose to discuss which wars are “just.” Justice in this context inevitably owes to situational morality as the combatants pray to their respective deities and make theological mockery of whatever religious interpretation devolves from these biased, selective judgments.

By all such standards, the Great War was especially horrible. The specific horror of this conflict, which eventually came to be known as World War I out of a contextual necessity to keep our historical accountings of human suffering clearly ordered, surely represents societal innocence shattered on an unfathomably massive scale.

An entire generation that had known no war outside of mock duels and parlor games willingly marched off to slaughter while gaily singing songs about honor and glory, and consequently, it’s a safe bet that World War I was the last disastrous conflict to feature a soundtrack entirely devoid of irony. Western societies would have to wait decades and refine techniques of amplification until the onset of thrash metal’s inherent violence finally provided music capable of approximating the grim reality of institutionalized murder.

Earlier this year, the last British veteran of the war died. Perhaps one American soldier of the era remains alive – and, in the time it has taken for me to write this essay, perhaps he’s gone, too. The war began in 1914, and it has long since faded into the black and white images of crude newsreel footage that only hint at the carnage of trench warfare and the doltish, outmoded “leadership” on the part of uniformed war criminals.

Providentially, my own grandfather was drafted too late for combat duty. He managed the not inconsiderable task of avoiding the flu pandemic that killed more American soldiers than enemy fire. My father then followed suit by serving in the Marines during World War II, which was “his” war, and a subject of fascination for him the remainder of his life.

I, too, went overseas, although not in uniform. In 1987, I found myself in Sopron, Hungary, choosing a beautiful early summer’s day to go for a hike in the hills. I came upon a large, older cemetery, and decided to walk through it, ascending a gentle, wooded slope past contemporary gravestones of the still-extant Communist era.

Like rings on a tree stump, history’s reverse chronology rotated as I continued uphill. Nearing the top, rows of Great War graves finally commenced. These were the soldiers who fought and died for the ruling family of the Austro-Hungarian Empire – the losers, as it were, who died as readily as the “winners” on the other side.

The first death dates were more recent: 1918, and then somewhat more from 1917, and as I scanned their names, the majority Hungarian, but also some Germanic and Slavic owing to the mutli-ethnic, polyglot nature of the Habsburg domain – as I contemplated how ridiculously, stupidly youthful so many of them were – I reached the lip of the hill, rather puzzled that there seemed to be no graves from earlier war years.

The answer to my befuddlement was just on the other side. Dipping into a valley studded with older, larger hardwoods, row after row of markers told the lethal tale: Died in 1916, 1915 and 1914.

I always think about the cemetery in Sopron on Veterans Day, formerly Armistice Day, which originally fell on November 11th because that's when the fighting stopped in 1918, ending the First Great World War and enabling a “peace” conference in Versailles that did so much to ensure a second.

Previous generations knew about the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month, but all the other mass bloodlettings since required a consolidation of observance, and a holiday more intrinsically American. So be it, and I’m not here to disagree, even if we forget the first causes that brought it about.

However, we’re left with those many innocent, misplaced songs. Now that living memory has passed, they speak even more eloquently about life, death and our capacity, sometimes successful, and often not, to make sense out of the insensible.

A CBS television documentary, World War One, ran from 1964-65, comprising 26 half-hour episodes, and later airing on cable. My friend Barrie videotaped them. The series is now available on DVD (you can see excerpts on YouTube), and I’m weighing a Christmas purchase, because one of the episodes, “Tipperary and All That Jazz,” has haunted me since the first time he and I watched it around the time of my Sopron sojourn.

Ancient film, much of it depicting camp life behind the lines, forms a backdrop for song snippets. They are melancholy, sentimental and elegiac. It is heartbreaking … and very real.

There's a long, long trail a-winding
Into the land of my dreams,
Where the nightingales are singing,
And a white moon beams.
There's a long, long night of waiting
Until my dreams all come true,
Till the day when I'll be going
Down that long, long trail with you.

An annual reminder: Forgotten fields in Flanders on Armistice (Veterans) Day.

The annual renewal of Veterans Day reminds us that 2017 is the 99th anniversary of the Great War's end. The conflict's centenary was in 2014, and throughout 2017 there have been 100-year memories of horrific battles like Passchendaele and the Caporetto.

Why is this important? Among other reasons, Americans remember 11/11/11 each year in the form of a holiday that has come to embrace the service of all veterans, not just the World War I generation.

Veterans Day is an official United States holiday honoring armed service veterans. It is a federal holiday that is observed on November 11th. It coincides with other holidays such as Armistice Day or Remembrance Day, which are celebrated in other parts of the world and also mark the anniversary of the signing of the Armistice that ended World War I. (Major hostilities of World War I were formally ended at the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month of 1918 with the German signing of the Armistice.)

November 9 was the 28th anniversary of the day the Berlin Wall fell. As I'm fond of arguing, the armistice in 1918 didn't end the first war at all. The demise of the Wall did -- well, maybe. There's the Yugoslav civil war of the 1990s to consider, and now that the religious division of Ireland is back in the news as a result of Brexit ...

Thus, future historians might refer to the period of 1912-1989 as the "77 Years' War," or perhaps tack on another decade and pronounce the 87 Years' War as concluding with the bombardment of Belgrade by NATO. Most of us will be gone by then, anyway.

Here is a guest column originally published in the pre-merger Tribune on November 5, 2009.

---

Forgotten fields in Flanders.

Lately I keep hearing this tune.

Keep the home fires burning,
While your hearts are yearning,
Though your lads are far away
They dream of home.

These dreaming lads were soldiers, in route across the English Channel to fight for the United Kingdom, and several hundred thousand of them failed to return home to nostalgically remember a popular song written to inspire the home front in their absence.

By now it should be clear that war is horrible, and I’m not sure that it serves any purpose to discuss which wars are “just.” Justice in this context inevitably owes to situational morality as the combatants pray to their respective deities and make theological mockery of whatever religious interpretation devolves from these biased, selective judgments.

By all such standards, the Great War was especially horrible. The specific horror of this conflict, which eventually came to be known as World War I out of a contextual necessity to keep our historical accountings of human suffering clearly ordered, surely represents societal innocence shattered on an unfathomably massive scale.

An entire generation that had known no war outside of mock duels and parlor games willingly marched off to slaughter while gaily singing songs about honor and glory, and consequently, it’s a safe bet that World War I was the last disastrous conflict to feature a soundtrack entirely devoid of irony. Western societies would have to wait decades and refine techniques of amplification until the onset of thrash metal’s inherent violence finally provided music capable of approximating the grim reality of institutionalized murder.

Earlier this year, the last British veteran of the war died. Perhaps one American soldier of the era remains alive – and, in the time it has taken for me to write this essay, perhaps he’s gone, too. The war began in 1914, and it has long since faded into the black and white images of crude newsreel footage that only hint at the carnage of trench warfare and the doltish, outmoded “leadership” on the part of uniformed war criminals.

Providentially, my own grandfather was drafted too late for combat duty. He managed the not inconsiderable task of avoiding the flu pandemic that killed more American soldiers than enemy fire. My father then followed suit by serving in the Marines during World War II, which was “his” war, and a subject of fascination for him the remainder of his life.

I, too, went overseas, although not in uniform. In 1987, I found myself in Sopron, Hungary, choosing a beautiful early summer’s day to go for a hike in the hills. I came upon a large, older cemetery, and decided to walk through it, ascending a gentle, wooded slope past contemporary gravestones of the still-extant Communist era.

Like rings on a tree stump, history’s reverse chronology rotated as I continued uphill. Nearing the top, rows of Great War graves finally commenced. These were the soldiers who fought and died for the ruling family of the Austro-Hungarian Empire – the losers, as it were, who died as readily as the “winners” on the other side.

The first death dates were more recent: 1918, and then somewhat more from 1917, and as I scanned their names, the majority Hungarian, but also some Germanic and Slavic owing to the mutli-ethnic, polyglot nature of the Habsburg domain – as I contemplated how ridiculously, stupidly youthful so many of them were – I reached the lip of the hill, rather puzzled that there seemed to be no graves from earlier war years.

The answer to my befuddlement was just on the other side. Dipping into a valley studded with older, larger hardwoods, row after row of markers told the lethal tale: Died in 1916, 1915 and 1914.

I always think about the cemetery in Sopron on Veterans Day, formerly Armistice Day, which originally fell on November 11th because that's when the fighting stopped in 1918, ending the First Great World War and enabling a “peace” conference in Versailles that did so much to ensure a second.

Previous generations knew about the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month, but all the other mass bloodlettings since required a consolidation of observance, and a holiday more intrinsically American. So be it, and I’m not here to disagree, even if we forget the first causes that brought it about.

However, we’re left with those many innocent, misplaced songs. Now that living memory has passed, they speak even more eloquently about life, death and our capacity, sometimes successful, and often not, to make sense out of the insensible.

A CBS television documentary, World War One, ran from 1964-65, comprising 26 half-hour episodes, and later airing on cable. My friend Barrie videotaped them. The series is now available on DVD (you can see excerpts on YouTube), and I’m weighing a Christmas purchase, because one of the episodes, “Tipperary and All That Jazz,” has haunted me since the first time he and I watched it around the time of my Sopron sojourn.

Ancient film, much of it depicting camp life behind the lines, forms a backdrop for song snippets. They are melancholy, sentimental and elegiac. It is heartbreaking … and very real.

There's a long, long trail a-winding
Into the land of my dreams,
Where the nightingales are singing,
And a white moon beams.
There's a long, long night of waiting
Until my dreams all come true,
Till the day when I'll be going
Down that long, long trail with you.

"The nation must be taught to bear losses."

This is a French village in August, 1916.

The idea that a war can be won by standing on the defensive and waiting for the enemy to attack is a dangerous fallacy, which owes its inception to the desire to evade the price of victory.’
-- Field Marshall Douglas Haig

The nation must be taught to bear losses. No amount of skill on the part of the higher commanders, no training, however good, on the part of the officers and men, no superiority of arms and ammunition, however great, will enable victories to be won without the sacrifice of men’s lives. The nation must be prepared to see heavy casualty lists.
-- Written by Haig in June 1916 before the Battle of the Somme began.

Very successful attack this morning… All went like clockwork… The battle is going very well for us and already the Germans are surrendering freely. The enemy is so short of men that he is collecting them from all parts of the line. Our troops are in wonderful spirits and full of confidence.
-- A report by Haig on the first day of attack (at the Somme), 1st July 1916.

Appropriately, Brexit hasn't put a dent into the UK's remembrances of the Battle of the Somme, which began 100 years ago today.

I tend toward the traditional view of the war's military leadership caste as donkeys and butchers, although nowadays there are periodic attempts to claim a more balanced legacy for the likes of Haig.

Good luck with that, and better luck than 60,000 British casualties on the battle's first day.

The Battle of the Somme: 141 days of horror (BBC)

A battle of attrition

The Battle of the Somme, fought in northern France, was one of the bloodiest of World War One. For five months the British and French armies fought the Germans in a brutal battle of attrition on a 15-mile front. The aims of the battle were to relieve the French Army fighting at Verdun and to weaken the German Army. However, the Allies were unable to break through German lines. In total, there were over one million dead and wounded on all sides.

A century of Sinatra.

Just last week, making not explicit connection to Frank Sinatra's centenary, I listened to a collection of his hits with Tommy Dorsey's big band (1939-1942). Dorsey was an old pro, business-minded, "no bullshit" taskmaster, and he saw Sinatra's talent (and profit potential):

"You could almost feel the excitement coming up out of the crowds when the kid stood up to sing. Remember, he was no matinée idol. He was just a skinny kid with big ears. I used the stand there so amazed I'd almost forget to take my own solos."

Dorsey and Sinatra were like father and son, until Sinatra wanted out of his contract. Then it got contentious, and they never made up. Dorsey again:

"(Sinatra's) the most fascinating man in the world, but don't put your hand in the cage."

All else aside, in the end it was all about the music, which will be how Sinatra is remembered.

A very long retirement: Sinatra’s bittersweet final years remembered, by Richard Williams (The Guardian)

... On what would have been his 100th birthday – Sinatra was born in Hoboken, New Jersey, on 12 December 1915 – it’s worth remembering that for all that he is fixed in the public mind as the Chairman of the Board, or the boorish leader of the Rat Pack, Sinatra was at his most remarkable as a singer and, even as his voice faltered as his career neared its close, it was as a singer that he sought to cement his legacy.

"Sophie, Sophie, don't die! Stay alive for the children."

This is the image that started it all for me. It shows the heir to the throne of Austria-Hungary and his wife, exiting the town hall in Sarajevo and unwittingly preparing for an appointment with destiny via two well-placed gunshots from Gavrilo Princip.

It was 100 years ago today, and the people pictured above are not happy. It was about to get worse.

The irony of the Archduke's death is that it provided the pretext for the cataclysm of the Great War (now known as World War I). Franz Ferdinand may have been an unsympathetic, disagreeable figure in many ways, but he understood what so many other did not: His empire was not equipped to fight a modern, industrial war. Six weeks after his death, Austria-Hungary invaded tiny Serbia, and was mauled repeatedly by the Serbs until Germany came to the rescue. Meanwhile, general conflict had erupted throughout Europe, the consequences of which endure a century later.

From 1985 through 2006, the life of Franz Ferdinand was a recurring motif in my Central European travels. In 2008, I attempted to explain it, at least in part. It is my hope some day to have the chance to retrace these steps, all in one trip through the former Habsburg lands.

---

Readers of history already know the emperor Franz Joseph's nephew, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, as the man whose 1914 assassination in Sarajevo lit the fuse for the Great War. As for me, since my very first visit to Europe in 1985, when I made a visit to Austria's national military museum for the sole purpose of viewing the Archduke's blood-splattered tunic and the automobile he and his wife were using to drive through Sarajevo when Gavrilo Princip's bullets ended their lives, visiting the various Central European locales on the Franz Ferdinand heritage trail has been a constant attraction.

The military museum was first, and also in 1985, I walked through the crypt of the Austrian emperors in Vienna precisely to see where Franz Ferdinand and his wife are not buried – and this absence is a very important part of the overall story.

The Archduke was a blunt, obnoxious, violent, unlikable and repressed human being who in his spare time enjoyed slaughtering wildlife under the guise of hunting.

He also did something decidedly uncommon among his brethren European royalty of the age: He fell madly in love, and remained just as madly in love, with a woman decreed by the royal court to be inadequately marriageable for an heir to the throne, and so he married her anyway, even though doing so forced him to renounce the path of succession for the children, and to acknowledge that Sophie could not participate in the normal trappings of royal life … or enjoy an eternal resting place alongside the properly accredited Habsburg family members.

Inexplicably, the otherwise indefensible Franz Ferdinand was transformed into the perfect family man at home in various estates and castles scattered throughout the realm … but, not unexpectedly, his perceived mistreatment at the hands of protocol rankled, and he nursed a smoldering grudge until the end of his life, which came in Sarajevo during a journey of largely unnecessary semi-official business that was undertaken because it geographically placed he and his wife outside the direct control of the court, inside a province that had been annexed only a short time before, and enabled him to provide his wife, albeit it briefly, with the "official" perks denied her otherwise.

All this meant less than nothing to a young group of nationalistic Bosnian revolutionary conspirators who detested the empire and were being trained and financed by a covert arm of the independent Serbian kingdom's military arm in Belgrade ("Black Hand"), and thus we are brought back to Sarajevo, where the motley crew of inflamed and malnourished terrorists plotted their tragicomic ambush of the Archduke.

To start, a bomb was inexpertly tossed. It bounced off the hood of Franz Ferdinand's car and ignited on the one following it, injuring a subaltern. The bomb thrower sought first to drown himself, jumping from an adjacent bridge into the two-foot-deep river, then, thwarted, tried to ingest poison that wasn't poison. He was quickly arrested and the group dissolved in panic, with Princip adjourning to the curb outside a coffee house to morosely consider the failures of the botched performance.

Meanwhile, in spite of the bomb attempt and further warnings that security could not be guaranteed, a supremely annoyed Archduke elected to finish the official visit to Sarajevo's town hall, resulting in one of the most incredible photos you'll ever see, with the bedecked Austrian royal visibly bursting veins while minor officials in vests and fezes offer tepid and embarrassed salutes. The fear in their eyes is palpable even in the ancient black and white photo. A bad moon is about to rise, and they know it.

But nothing can be done when it comes to fate, especially in the Balkans.

Sure enough, perhaps an hour later, the motorcade resumed without the Archduke's staff having communicated to the lead driver a slight change in route undertaken to make the return safer. Having missed the turn, the cars were halted on the street directly outside the coffee shop where Princip now emerged to find his original target stock still and seated only 20 feet away, posing for the crosshairs. Princip fired two shots, one each for Franz Ferdinand and Sophie, both inexplicably perfect in aim, and within moments, the heir and his wife were both dead.

Throughout my subsequent travels, I've visited the Archduke's "hunting lodge" in Benesov, outside Prague, consumed the beer brewed in his name nearby, returned to Vienna to tour the Belvedere Palace (his official residence), and finally in 2003, arduously climbed the steep side of the Danube valley on a bicycle for the privilege of seeing the ancestral castle at Artstetten, and being presented the key to the mausoleum by the lady on duty so that after twenty-two years, the couple's graves could at last be viewed and my respects offered.

But Sarajevo in 1987 remains the benchmark. The town hall, the bridge and the museum located where the coffee shop had been … the footprints in the concrete sidewalk to show where Princip stood when he struck his blows against the empire … and the ambience of this strange old town with minarets and church spires both Catholic and Eastern Orthodox, not to mention synagogues, nestled together on a hillside, with the sprawling newer town encompassing a winter Olympics complex.

Pierce, Thompson and the Manics on the life of Richard Nixon.

That's right: One hundred years ago on Wednesday, Richard Nixon was born. The tributes are effusive and deadly accurate, as with Charlie Pierce's take.

Happy Birthday And I'm Glad You're Still Dead, by Charles P. Pierce (Esquire)

If he were still alive, and the existence of god thereby utterly disproved in a huge and public way, this would have been Richard Nixon's 100th birthday ...

... There will be a lot of chin-rubbing and beard-pulling, and discreet apologias on the theme of what a "quintessentially American" life was led by Richard Nixon. This a whole load of bollocks. I know hundreds of Americans who live their quintessentially American lives without doing a fraction of the damage that Richard Nixon did to his country and to the world simply by getting out of bed in the morning. His crimes are not excused by his neuroses. The subsequent dementia of the Republican party does not absolve him of the damage he did to our politics. Nixon was not "us." Most of us don't kill Asians to prove to someone else how tough we are. Most of us don't cover our workplaces with shame and disgrace and then claim that somebody else, and there was always somebody else with him, was really to blame.

But there's more!

Let's not forget Hunter S. Thompson's world-classic Nixon obituary from 1994, as originally published in Rolling Stone: He Was a Crook.

If the right people had been in charge of Nixon's funeral, his casket would have been launched into one of those open-sewage canals that empty into the ocean just south of Los Angeles. He was a swine of a man and a jabbering dupe of a president. Nixon was so crooked that he needed servants to help him screw his pants on every morning. Even his funeral was illegal. He was queer in the deepest way. His body should have been burned in a trash bin.

The last word goes to the Manic Street Preachers (from the album Lifeblood, 2004).