On one stretch of the front, the Christmas truce of 1914 was struck for the sake of the post: Belgian soldiers asked the Germans to pass their letters on to families living in occupied Belgium.

1914

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The events

• Christmas truce1914 · Western Front, Flanders. At Christmas 1914, five months into the war, British, French and German soldiers on many sectors of the front stopped shooting without orders. They met in no man's land, swapped food and souvenirs, sang carols together and, by many accounts, played football.
• World War I1914–1918 · Sarajevo. The assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo in June 1914 drew the great powers into a war of the Entente against Germany and its allies. It killed millions and brought down the German, Austro-Hungarian, Russian and Ottoman empires.

20th century

More amazing facts

• 1914 Passenger pigeons once numbered in the billions, but the last one, Martha, died on 1 September 1914 — a month after World War I began.
• 1914 · 1928 The cheapest toll in Panama Canal history was 36 cents, paid in 1928 by writer Richard Halliburton, who swam it. The fee was set by his weight: 140 pounds.
• 1914 Gavrilo Princip was not eating a sandwich when the archduke's car arrived; that detail was invented in 2001.
• 1914 · 1915 Winnie-the-Pooh is named after a real bear brought to London by World War I. In August 1914 Harry Colebourn, a Canadian cavalry vet, bought a cub from a hunter and named her Winnipeg; from 1915 she lived at London Zoo.
• 1914 Britain's King George V was a first cousin of both Nicholas II and Kaiser Wilhelm II. In 1914 Britain and Russia went to war against Germany — two cousins against the third.
• 1914 The Panama Canal opened in a world already at war. The first ship passed through on 15 August 1914, two and a half weeks after the First World War began, and the opening was a low-key affair.

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