The Saddest Words in History That Tore My Heart Into Pieces
The person who uttered them was quite powerful. Es ist nichts. (It is nothing.)
It was a beautiful morning when Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria, clad in his army uniform, was on an inspection trip of military barracks in Sarajevo, Herzegovina, a Bosnian territory annexed by the Austrian Empire in 1908.
He was happy, vigorous, and enamored by the presence of his wife, Sophie, Duchess of Hohenberg. They were well received, and the inspection went well.
However, he was utterly oblivious to the fact that later that afternoon, he would be slumping over the dead body of his wife, himself mortally wounded.
He could have hardly imagined that this would be his last day on the face of the earth.
He also couldn’t have imagined that this would be the last day; the world would give up the general peaceful environment and descend into the chaos of frightful events that would ultimately culminate in the First World War.
The Last Words of Archduke Franz Ferdinand
When Serbian nationalists shot them in their motorcade, his wife was the first to succumb to the wounds.
He was leaning over his wounded wife and said,
“Sophie, Sophie! Don’t die! Live for our children!”
But that was too late. His wife had already left her mortal abode, and she was dead and maybe couldn’t have heard him saying this to her.
After a few moments, he sagged to the floor of his vehicle, the blood throbbing down his chest, making a blood pool around him.
Slowly and gradually, his vision grew dim, and blackness was spread around.
When he was asked if his Imperial Highness was suffering very badly in those movements,
He uttered the saddest words in history and answered,
“Es is nichts. Es is nichts. Es is nichts”
(It is nothing. It is nothing. It is nothing.)
He kept repeating those words until he breathed his last and never to speak again.
The last words of Archduke Franz Ferdinand are considered to be the saddest and most tragic words in history. He couldn’t have imagined it’s everything now. This will change the shape of the world.
The incident not only took the lives of two people, but it turned the whole world to pay for those killings.
The last breaths of Archduke Franz breathed a new life into the regional wars that would soon engulf the whole world in its flames.
The World After His Death
One can explain the words of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in many ways, and he could have meant that the world is nothing.
He could have meant that he wasn’t hurt that much because his hurts might have sent him into a state of trance where he could not feel the external world.
But the world felt his death, and it felt it so dearly.
It was nothing to the Archduke, but it was everything to the world.
His death unleashed a rapid and uncanny chain of events that turned the world into a battlefield.
Austria-Hungary considered the Serbian government responsible for the attack because a Serbian nationalist carried out the assassination.
As a result, Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia on July 28, 1914.
It was a chain event. The declaration of the full-fledged war on Serbia invited the world to take sides because the Russians came in to support Serbia.
Germany was quick to take arms against Russia and its allies. France and Britain also jumped in and declared war on Germany, and soon the delicate balance of peace in Europe collapsed under the heavy feet of warring nations.
The war shook another great power from its deep slumber and brought it into the warring arena. The entry of the USA was really decisive in 1917.
What did the world pay As a Price for the Assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand?
It was the first deadliest war fought in history.
It was also the first war of such magnitude that it’s termed the First World War.
World War First was the deadliest war fought on the face of the earth. The humans were unaware of the horrors it brought forth to the world.
It was the first modern war that tore down the curtain of the old worldview and ushered us into a new modern world we see today. It unleashed an unprecedented era of the arms race and technological advancement that is still running at a fast pace.
However, this modernity was not free of cost. It took a heavy toll on humans and reshaped the world’s geographical boundaries because the old borders were not adequate to welcome the modern world.
New lines were drawn on the face of the earth.
Over the war, the world has lost 20 million people to the war. It also left 21 million people wounded and destroyed the infrastructure worth trillions of dollars.
The war also sapped the three great empires: The Russian Empire, The Ottoman Empire, and the Austro-Hungarian Empire. These powerful empires were thrown into the dustbin of history, never to be found again.
WWI didn’t finish all the businesses. Some of the serious questions were left unanswered that were simmering in the hearts and minds of some quarters.
Occasionally, those questions ignited the regional skirmishes, but the world maintained a fake peace for two decades.
Nearly a decade after, the world was plunged into an unparalleled economic recession, known as the Great Depression, that played havoc on the fragile development of the world.
And two decades after, the world was compelled to take up its arms again against each other to settle the old scores.
Nearly two decades after WWI and two and a half decades after the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the world was plunged into World War Second, which was more deadly and horrible than the first.
However, World War Second addressed some of the problems. Still, its end sparked another tussle between the two giants of the world — the Soviet Union and the USA — who professed different economic ideologies.
After World War II, those two ideologies, capitalism, and communism, shaped much of the modern world.
The development that happened during the Cold War era has still had far-reaching impacts on the world.
A current Russian-Ukrainian conflict is an event that can be traced back and chained with the beginning of WWI and the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand.
However, in his own words, which are considered to be the saddest words of the twentieth century, it’s nothing.
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