As a bonus, Princzip had also killed the archduke’s wife, and this rash act (the archduke’s assassination, that is, not Mrs. Archduke’s) served to spark a war involving Russia, Germany, Austria-Hungary, France and Great Britain. Ten million lives would be lost, twenty million souls would be wounded and twenty-five million tons of shipping would be sunk.

But the war was three thousand miles away, on this warm Friday evening in Manhattan in late April of 1915; the three of us were in a bustling Bavarian restaurant near Union Square, on Fourteenth Street. Perhaps the city’s best-known German restaurant, Luchow’s-with its dark woodwork and baroque dining rooms with their elaborate gilt-framed landscape oils and solemn looming stags’ heads-found its popularity unswayed by a growing anti-German sentiment, and remained a favorite haunt of writers, musicians and theater folk. Tonight I was dining at the invitation of publishing legend Samuel Sidney McClure and one of his associates, Edward Rumely.

We were seated at a table beneath the Wagner murals in the Niebelungen Room; I had my back to the eight-piece orchestra, which had been brought to this country by Victor Herbert, whose mediocre music they performed with all the lack of panache it deserved. Fortunately the din of dinner conversation all but drowned out the orchestra’s brainlessly lilting aural wallpaper. We were drinking beer from steins, having completed our prime beef and red cabbage.

McClure was a stern-looking character, with a short blunt nose and a carelessly trimmed white mustache, his blue eyes piercing in an almond-oval face topped with a shock of gray hair; a thought-gouged crease between his eyes suggested eternal skepticism. His brown vested suit with darker brown bow tie might have been the attire of a chief clerk, not the man who invented newspaper syndication, and whose McClure’s Magazine had taken on corruption in corporations and city government.