The Great War: American Front grim official holiday marking the 1882 surrender and keeping alive the dream of revenge for the two humiliations inflicted by the South. The novel's main plot begins on June 28, 1914, the same day Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie, Duchess of Hohenberg of Austria-Hungary, are assassinated in Sarajevo by Nedeljko Čabrinović with a bomb thrown into their car and explodes (as opposed to Gavrilo Princip with a gun in our timeline), with the incident drawing the European powers into a whirlwind of war. At the eruption of an alternate World War I known as the Great War, the
Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria Duke of Teschen. Franz began to visit Archduke Friedrich's villa in Pressburg (now Bratislava), and in turn Sophie wrote to Franz Ferdinand during his convalescence from tuberculosis on the island of Lošinj in the Adriatic. They kept their relationship a secret, until it was discovered by Isabella herself. To be eligible to marry a member of the imperial House of Habsburg, one had to be a member of one of the reigning or formerly reigning dynasties of Europe. The Choteks were not one of these families, although they did include among their ancestors, in the female line, princes of Baden,