But we are also remembering those, and here the first World War, in which this country and its people were swept up involuntarily on the great tides of the world stage, bit players in a bigger drama, though one which we also shaped and which left its own indelible mark on us. In commemorating the events of that fateful decade of 1912-22, during which history itself seemed to have accelerated at breakneck speed, The Irish Times has been marking with a series of supplements the great national moments in which our fellow countrymen and women reshaped and redefined Ireland. The American historian Fritz Stern called the war it “the first calamity of the 20th Century, the calamity from which all other calamities sprang.” The assassination 100 years ago in Sarajevo of the little-known heir to a declining empire, in many capitals a blip on a quiet news day, had the same relationship to the European storm that would become the first World War, a single domino falling that would bring down three empires and fan the flames of revolution and change the face of the modern world. A butterfly flaps its wings in the Amazonian jungle, and a storm ravages half of Europe. The events that trigger change in the world, chaos and complexity theories suggest, are often the tiny things. “ One day the great European War will come out of some damned foolish thing in the Balkans.” – Otto von Bismarck (1888)
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