WW+I

=World War I (4/6/17 - 11/11/18)= IThough tensions had been brewing in Europe–and especially in the troubled Balkan region–for years before conflict actually broke out, the spark that ignited World War I was struck in Sarajevo, Bosnia, where Archduke Franz Ferdinand, nephew of Emperor Franz Josef and heir to the Austro-Hungarian Empire, was shot to death along with his wife by the Serbian nationalist Gavrilo Princip on June 28, 1914. The assassination of Franz Ferdinand and Sophie set off a rapid chain of events: Austria-Hungary, like many in countries around the world, blamed the Serbian government for the attack and hoped to use the incident as justification for settling the question of Slavic nationalism once and for all. As Russia supported Serbia, Austria-Hungary waited to declare war until its leaders received assurances from German leader Kaiser Wilhelm II that Germany would support their cause in the event of a Russian intervention, which would likely involve Russia’s ally, France, and possibly Great Britain as well.

The world’s first global conflict, the “Great War” pitted the Central Powers of Germany, Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman Empire against the Allied forces of Great Britain, the United States, France, Russia, Italy and Japan. The introduction of modern technology to warfare resulted in unprecedented carnage and destruction, with more than 9 million soldiers killed by the end of the war in November 1918.

When you see millions of the mouthless dead

 Across your dreams in pale battalions go,

 Say not soft things as other men have said,

 That you’ll remember. For you need not so.

 Give them not praise. For, deaf, how should they know

 It is not curses heaped on each gashed head?

 Nor tears. Their blind eyes see not your tears flow.

 Nor honour. It is easy to be dead.

 Say only this, ‘They are dead.’ Then add thereto,

 ‘Yet many a better one has died before.’

 Then, scanning all the o’ercrowded mass, should you

 Perceive one face that you loved heretofore,

 It is a spook. None wears the face you knew.

 Great death has made all his for evermore.



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