CHAPTER VIII

THE OUTBREAK OF THE WAR

The Mysterious Tragedy of Sarajevo Who Killed the Archduke Ferdinand and His Wife, and Why?—Did the Slavs Conspire to Kill a Man Whom They Loved, or the Germans to Kill One Whom They Hated and Feared? - Significant Antecedents, Circumstances and Sequels of the Tragedy-Austria's Demands Upon Serbia Dictation from Berlin-Refusal to Seek a Peaceful Settlement - War Declared on the Basis of a Falsehood - Successive Declarations by Many Governments - International Law Ignored A Treaty as a "Scrap of Paper" - Proclamations of Neutrality — Attitude of the United States.

ON JUNE 28, 1914, occurred the tragedy of Sarajevo. The city is the capital of Bosnia, one of the Serbian provinces illegally seized by Austria a few years before the war. Thither on the date named went Archduke Francis Ferdinand, heir presumptive to the Austro-Hungarian thrones, and his morganatic wife, Sophia Chotek, Duchess of Hohenberg. In the morning they drove through the streets, and a bomb was thrown at them, without serious effect. In the afternoon they again drove through the streets, and were killed with pistol shots by Gavrilo Princip, a Bosnian youth, an Austrian subject, said by Austrians to be of Serbian ancestry but by Serbians to be a renegade Jew. Such is the brief record of one of the most mysterious crimes in the world's history, and one with the most tremendous and disastrous sequel. If it was not the cause, it was at any rate the pretext for the war of the nations.

As a mystery, it ranks with two other unexplained tragedies in royal and imperial life in the same quarter of the continent, namely, the death of the Austrian heir

A German Taube monoplane having located the British forces and made a sketch of their position, was suddenly attacked from above by a British Bristol biplane and a French Bleriot monoplane. In this way many pilots were shot in the air and their machines brought to the ground.

All the estimates are given in round numbers for graphic repr figures to one co

RS

ENGAGED IN LAND AND SEA OPERATIONS AT THE BEGINNING
WAR

entation, and also because of the difficulty of reducing official
mon denominator.

ONE OF THE FAMOUS BRITISH TANKS, AN AMERICAN INVENTION

Land battleships equipped with rapid-fire and machine guns and built to travel over trenches, shell craters and barbed wire impediments on the moving tracks seen on either side of the machine in the form of corrugated belts which run on wheels inside.