A Note From Bob

Tuesday. On this date in 1914, a telegram went out from Vienna to Belgrade, and a century that had convinced itself a general European war was no longer possible got one anyway. Four years later the maps of four empires had to be redrawn and roughly seventeen million people were dead. They called it the Great War, back when they still believed there would only be one. Today we hand you thirty-four questions on it. World War I is today's featured quiz. Pour the coffee.

Trivia Question of the Day

The answer is at the bottom of this email.

Today's Featured Quiz

It opened with two pistol shots in Sarajevo and closed in a railway carriage in a French forest. In between came the trenches, the machine gun, poison gas, the tank, the airplane turned into a weapon, and a peace settlement so grudging that the next war was arguably written into its terms. How well do you know it? 34 questions.

The Answer

Marshal Ferdinand Foch's private railway car, No. 2419D, was where Germany signed the armistice on November 11, 1918. In June 1940 it was a museum piece at Rethondes, in the Forest of Compiègne, so German engineers knocked out a wall of the building to get it back onto the original patch of track. Hitler arrived, took the chair Foch had used, listened to the preamble being read to the French delegation, and walked out. It was theater, and it was also the argument: the second war was in no small part a quarrel over how the first one had been settled. Today's second quiz takes you into the fighting.

On This Day

On this day in 1914, Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia by telegram, one month to the day after Archduke Franz Ferdinand was shot in Sarajevo. Within a week Russia, Germany, France, Belgium, and Britain had all been pulled in. The peace signed at Versailles five years later lasted twenty. The second act was fought on a far wider map, from Midway to Stalingrad to the hedgerows of Normandy, and thirty questions are waiting.