Search

...manager for his little "picture palace" in a cellar, not three miles from the German wire, where tired soldiers can drop in for an hour's relaxation, and forget the unpleasant enemy who is almost within shot. One cinema has been showing the Somme battle film, and the men who flock to see it display extraordinary interest in the incidents of the "great push". Some infantry...

...manage popular discontent. Strikes on the home-front, and desertion and even mutinies on the front threatened the governments’ war efforts as populations tired of warfare. An example is the French mutinies of April-July 1917 (kept secret at the time), when large numbers of infantry soldiers refused to fight. Some twenty-thousand soldiers were court-martialled as a...

...manager of the Soho works of Boulton and Watt, makers of steam engines), cheap coal being made available by Davy's lamp. The Soho factory was lit by 2600 lights as early as 1802 by Murdoch. A big improvement in lighting power came with the invention of the mantle (1885), where the flame impinged on a woven fibre sphere impregnated with special salts. Such lights are still...

...managed to shoot the Archduke in the neck and his wife in the abdomen. Sophie died in the car, and Franz Ferdinand shortly after reaching the residence of the Governor. The conspirators could not know, and certainly had not planned, that a world war would result from this act of violence, but in the weeks that followed, decisions were made in Europe’s capitals that...