Osler and the Canadians in Folkestone.

28 June 1914 was a glorious summer day in Folkestone. The Leas, perhaps the most beautiful promenade in England, overlooked the twinkling blue English Channel, and out of a cloudless sky the sun blazed down on the well-to-do as they strolled between the Hotel Metropole and the Grand Hotel. The Boer War was but a memory. King George V sat on the throne, albeit the architecture of the town was more characteristically in the Edwardian style, associated with his late father. If the strollers thought at all about Canada it might well have been some stirring tale of that young Dominion published in the Boy's Own Paper, and those who thought of Ireland would have associated it with Home Rule Bills and sighed gently at the failure of Mr Gladstone to solve this perennial problem. Who would blame them if they did not realise that that afternoon Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife, the Countess Sophie Chotek, were celebrating their 14th wedding anniversary by inspecting the Austro-Hungarian army in Bosnia at its capital, Sarajevo. Nor could they expect that a 19-year-old schoolboy, Gavrilo Prinzip, was going to step on to the running-board of the royal car, killing the Archduke with one shot and his wife sitting in the back with a second. Yet, on that glorious June afternoon, 62 years ago, the fuse of the greatest battle in history was lit.