1 - Latin Bridge, Sarajevo, Austria-Hungary, 28 June 1914, 11:00 a.m.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 August 2023
Summary
A nineteen-year-old man from Obljaj, Austria-Hungary, steps onto the footboard of a Gräf & Stift Double Phaeton car and shoots Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria and his wife Sophie, Duchess of Hohenberg. His name is Gavrilo Princip and this happens on the morning of 28 June 1914 in Sarajevo.
Made in 1918, the newsreel L’esercito americano in Italia durante la Prima Guerra Mondiale (The American Army in Italy during the First World War) includes several scenes filmed in the regions of Veneto and Friuli-Venezia Giulia and shows American soldiers and officials at work in the supply and support lines of the front or walking in local towns and villages. Among other locations, a sequence from this newsreel was filmed on the trenches along the Piave River near the village of Varago, the theatre of the Second Battle of the Piave River, which was fought in June 1918 and resulted in over 20,000 deaths and 100,000 wounded. The American Army in Italy during the First World War also provides an evocative visual record of the landscape of the battles which took place on the Italian front of the First World War and which would later be sketched by Ernest Hemingway in A Farewell to Arms. This novel was based on the writer's recollection of the time he spent in Italy in 1917 and 1918 as a volunteer ambulance driver and in its opening paragraph Hemingway describes the unfolding of military action taking place across the spectacular scenery of the region:
In the late summer of that year we lived in a house in a village that looked across the river and the plain to the mountains. In the bed of the river there were pebbles and boulders, dry and white in the sun, and the water was clear and swiftly moving and blue in the channels. Troops went by the house and down the road and the dust they raised powdered the leaves of the trees. The trunks of the trees too were dusty and the leaves fell early that year and saw the troops marching along the road and the dust rising and leaves, stirred by the breeze, falling and soldiers marching and afterward the road bare and white except for the leaves.
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- Film, Hot War Traces and Cold War Spaces , pp. 15 - 34Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2022