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

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The event

• 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 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 · 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 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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