Name: World War I: The Seminal Tragedy - One Fateful Day in June - Extra History - #2
Uploaded: 2022-06-26T22:24:10.000Z
Duration: 8 min 17 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Basic passive voice

[male narrator]  All right, the stage is set.

Now let's put the  players in their places.

The curtain opens on the back  of a rundown cafe in Belgrade.

and takes a seat at a table with a handful of other young men huddled around.

They still to hush as he  opens the package.

Inside is a single piece of paper,  a newspaper clipping.

The one who brought the package  bends over to stare at the page.

One of the other young men slide a candle  across the table so he can better see.

Before him, circled in red,  is the headline and it reads,

“Archduke Franz Ferdinand  to Visit Sarajevo.”

Now we skip ahead a few weeks,  where outside the palace

are getting in an open-top car,  a hundred years ago this year.

She is wearing a flowing,  white dress and laughing.

This is Franz Ferdinand,  the Archduke of Austria,

next in line for succession  to the throne,

They've come to Sarajevo  to watch military maneuvers.

They've come to get away from  the stifling courts of Austria,

will never be accepted  due to her low birth.

But things have been really  tense in this part of the empire.

The Serbian agitators have been  acting with increased boldness

to demand a Serbia free and  independent from Austrian rule.

And this day of all days  falls on the anniversary

of one of the greatest battles  in Serbian history:

It's one of the great rallying  points of the Serbian people,

To Serbian nationalists,  this is one of their proudest days.

And for them,  for the Archduke of Austria,

the symbol of their oppression,  the embodiment foreign rule

to come here on that date  was the greatest insult.

Now, perhaps the Archduke had  chosen that day to show solidarity,

to ease tensions, to make  the people of Serbia understand

Maybe he simply didn't know that  the day had any special importance,

But whatever the reason,  he was ill-informed.

For on any other day, the events  that are about to play out

On any other day, this might have turned out  simply to be your average parade,

an event which wouldn't even go  down as a historical footnote

But something had  to happen on this day.

It was two symbolic, too important,  too grand of a story.

And so the first domino is placed  in the mad and improbable events

the royal couple begins to process  down the streets of Sarajevo,

flanked by five other cars filled  with officials and guards.

The world knows exactly where  the Archduke is gonna be.

And those young men from that cafe  in Belgrade are there in that crowd.

and are part of the much more  ominously named Black Hand--

Angry in the way that  only young men can be,

I mean that barely any of them  had reached the age of twenty.

They had in them  an anger born of ideals.

Or they had ideals  to rationalize their anger.

or a cause to justify the brash kind  of risk-taking that truly borders madness.

One by one, the Archduke's car  passes his would-be assassins.

Two of his assassins  ended up succumbing to fear

One felt pity for his wife  sitting in the car

and just couldn't bring  himself to pull the trigger.

Another one had an  equipment malfunction.

smiling and waving in an open-top car  so the world could better see.

an assassin finally steps forward and  throws a bomb at the Archduke's car.

Ferdinand sees it and dives  behind the door of the car

as the bomb passes over him  and bounces into the street behind.