The Fuse of WAR was Lit!

Today's History Lesson...WWI

War is an ugly beast. It shows no mercy regardless of age, race, creed, religion, gender or any other factor for that matter. The aftermath of war is tumultuous destruction leaving massive graves of blood and bone in its wake where strength and courage were put to the ultimate test. While on this day began what was hoped to be "the war to end all wars," unfortunately the war to accomplish such a task would be the one marking the end the world.

This Day in History: July 28, 1914

Today marks 102 years since the fuse of The Great War, World War I (WWI), the first world war was lit. It carried with it hopes of being "the war to end all wars," but the concluding peace treaty actually set the stage for World War II. The events of an extremely bloody war fought mostly by soldiers in trenches resulted in an estimated 10 million military deaths, 20 million wounded. 

What prompted such massive death and tumultuous destruction?

The spark that started World War I was the assassination of Austria's Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie. The assassination occurred on June 28, 1914 while Ferdinand was visiting the city of Sarajevo in the Austro-Hungarian province of Bosnia-Herzegovina.

When Austria-Hungary declares war on Serbia, this effectively begins the First World War. Events from that day lead to Winston Churchill being proven right in a comment written to his wife, "My darling one and beautiful, everything tends towards catastrophe and collapse!"

On August 1, after its demands for Russia to halt mobilization met with defiance, Germany declared war on Russia. Russia's ally, France, ordered its own general mobilization that same day, and on August 3, France and Germany declared war on each other. The German army's planned invasion of neutral Belgium, announced on August 4, prompted Britain to declare war on Germany. Thus, in the summer of 1914, the major powers in the Western world—with the exception of the United States and Italy, both of which declared their neutrality, at least for the time being—flung themselves headlong into the First World War.

It was supposed to be the war to end war.

For over four years World War I raged on,
leaving in its wake a toll of death and destruction
such as the world had never seen.

These are the images of that time,
an eternal testament to all those whose lives were lost or
forever altered by The Great War.