La Gare de L’Est

Paris, 18:45 hours, June, 28, 1914

In twenty-nine minutes the “Orient-Express” will depart the Gare de l’Est bound for Constantinople. None of these passengers gathering on this platform in Paris would be able to imagine that an assassination in Bosnia might change their lives. At this moment, only two of them know that it happened. Too many of the others won’t care. Nevertheless, in 34 days the old European order will convulse and begin to die.

The murder of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand at Sarajevo is often said to have been “the cause” of the First World War, but the many, long festering causes ran far deeper than the wounds of the assassin’s bullets.

“The Sarajevo 1914 Collection” exists in part to help explain those causes, chilling examples of humanity’s folly, indeed its willful, pigheaded stupidity. There’s ample blame to go round – on both sides. That avoidable event remains high on the short list of the world’s most horrifying stories.

At the center of this photograph, his head bowed in thought and his face turned away, is Paul Wittgenstein, a young concert pianist recently embarked on a promising career. During the journey between Paris and Vienna, where he lives, the young musician will learn of the assassination. At the end of July, he’ll be called up with his Austrian dragoon regiment as mobilization is declared among the nations soon to be at war with one another. In the first month of the fighting in Galicia, only a few kilometers inside the Russian frontier, Wittgenstein will be shot through his right elbow by a Russian sniper. The arm will be amputated and he will survive to resume his concert career, commissioning concerti “for the left hand” that, brilliantly performed by Wittgenstein and against all odds, assured his musical fame.

One of the train’s baggage vans provides background for the scene. The gown the Grand Duchess is wearing was originally created for her by Worth in Paris. Reproduction of it in HO scale was an especially demanding task.