Mein Kampf
Then the Boer War appeared like heat-lightning on my horizon. Every day I lay in wait for the newspapers, devoured reports and dispatches, and was happy to witness this heroic struggle even from a distance.
The Russo-Japanese War found me considerably more mature, and also more observant. Here I took sides for more nationalist reasons, and supported the Japanese in every exchange of opinions among us. In the defeat of the Russians I saw at the same time a defeat of the Austrian Slavs.
Years had passed since then, and what as a boy I had thought was sluggish sickliness I now felt as the calm before the storm. Even in my Vienna days the Balkans were sweltering under the pale sultriness which usually presages the hurricane, and already gleams of light were beginning to flicker up, only to be lost again in the uncanny darkness. But then came the Balkan War, and with it the first puff of wind whipped across a nervous Europe. The coming time lay upon men like a nightmare, like feverish, brooding tropical heat, so that the perpetual worry finally turned the feeling of approaching catastrophe into longing: let Heaven give free rein to the destiny which could no longer be averted. Then the first mighty flash of lightning struck the earth. The storm broke, and the thunder of the sky was mixed with the roar of the batteries in the World War.
When the news of the murder of Archduke Francis Ferdinand arrived in Munich (I was sitting at home, and heard the deed only vaguely described), I was worried at first for fear the bullets had come from the pistols of German students, indignant at the Crown Prince’s continual work for Slavicization, who wished to free the German people from this enemy within. What the result would have been is easily imagined: a new wave of persecution which would have been “thoroughly justified” befor the whole world. But immediately afterward, when I heard the names of the suspected assassins and read that they were known to be Serbians, I began to feel a faint horror at this revenge of inscrutable Fate.
The great Slavophile had fallen by the bullets of Slavic fanatics.
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