Jules Andre Peugeot by French Army – Original publication: 1914, France. Immediate source: David O’Mara. Via Wikipedia

Jules Andre Peugeot was born at Etupes, France, on June 11, 1893. He was the son of Jules Albert Peugot and Francien Marie Frederique Pechin. He was a teacher, appointed to the school at Pissoux. He was regarded as a kindly man and well liked by his students. In 1913, he was conscripted into the French army.

Albert Otto Walter Mayer was born on April 24, 1892, in Magdeburg, Germany. Shortly thereafter, his family moved to the Alsace region. He became a Lieutenant in the German army.

On August 2, 1914, the day before Germany officially declared war on France, Lt. Mayer was assigned to a reconnaissance squadron to sueveil French positions. At 10:00 AM, he approached the village of Joncherey.

Corporal Peugot had been having breakfast at the house of one Monsieur Doucourt, where he had been billeted. M. Doucourt’s daughter, Nicolet, came in and alerted the soldiers that a German patrol had entered the town. The soldiers ran out, and Peugot yelled at Mayer to stop. Mayer pulled out his pistol and shot Peugot. Peugot returned the shot but missed. The other French soldiers returned fire, however, killing Mayer. Peugot died a few minutes later on the steps of the house.  The two bodies were placed side by side in the straw in a barn.

Mayer and Peugot were the first German and French casualties of the Great War.

Leutnant Albert Mayer Grabstein 01 09  par Хрюша — Travail personnel. Sous licence Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons

In 2008, on the occasion of the death of the last French veteran of the war, French President Sarkozy remembered the two men:

The Frenchman was 21 years old. He was a teacher. His name was Jules-André Peugeot. The German is Alsatian, a native of the region of Mulhouse. He was just 20 years old. His name was (Albert) Camille Mayer.

They loved life as we love it in 20 years. They had no vengeance, they had no hate to satisfy.

They were 20 years old, the same dreams of love, the same ardor, the same courage.

They were 20 years old and felt that the world was theirs.

They were 20 years old; they believed in happiness.

They had barely left childhood and did not want to die. They both died on a beautiful summer morning, one with a bullet in the shoulder, the other shot in the stomach. They were the first unconscious actors in the same tragedy whose blind fate and folly had long secretly woven a sinister plot that would take its son in a sacrifice of heroic youth.

Both died at 20 years and did not see the terrible result of what they began: These millions of deaths, mowed down by machine guns embedded in the mud of the trenches, torn by shells. Nor did they see the huge crowd of millions of wounded, crippled, disfigured, gassed, who lived with the nightmare of war etched into their flesh.

They did not see their parents crying, widows mourning their husbands, children crying for their fathers. They did not experience the suffering of a soldier who smokes a cigarette to overcome the smell of dead abandoned by those who did not even had time to throw them a few clods of earth, so that do not see them rot. ”

These two young men of twenty years did not experience nights of rain, the winter in the trenches, “silent and shivering waiting long minutes like hours.” They did not cross columns returning fire “with their wounds, their blood, their mask of suffering” and their eyes seemed to say to those over, “Do not go there!” They did not fight tirelessly against mud, against rats, against lice, against the night, against the cold, against fear.

They did not have to live for years with the memory of so much pain, with the thought of so many lives Blasted next to them and the need to step over the body to mount an assault.

References

Rene Puaux, The Lie of the 3rd of August, 1914 (1917)

Jules-André Peugeot at Wikipedia

Jules-André Peugeot at French Wikipedia

Albert Mayer at French Wikipedia

The First to Fall: Peugot and Mayer

Skirmish at Joncherey at Wikipedia

Declaration of President Sarkozy (French)

As reported here in the New York Evening World, August 1, 1914, Germany declared war against Russia. The paper also reports that France is in the process of mobilizing.

As seen on the front page of the Harrisburg Telegraph of July 31, 1914, war in Europe is now certain. Russia is putting its army on a war footing, and in both Berlin and London, war is believed to be inevitable.

A hundred years ago today, July 30, 1914, Germany, Russia, and the other powers had yet to join the war, and there was some hope that they would not. But as this front-page cartoon in the Harrisburg Telegraph makes clear, that hope was quickly fading.

Washington Times, July 26, 1914

On June 26, 1914, Europe was at war. With its ultimatum  not heeded to its satisfaction, Austria declared war on Serbia and its army began marching on Belgrade. The Serbian capital, which the government had deemed indefensible, had been evacuated. King Peter of Serbia had instead shifted the seat of government 60 miles to the south to the mountain town of Kraguyevats. Within days, Russia, Germany, Britain, and France would join the war.

A hundred years ago, the front page of the New York Sun of July 24, 1914 reported that the Panama Canal was scheduled to open on August 15 to vessels drawing less than thirty feet. It reported that the Canadian government’s upgrades to the Cape Race wireless station would double its range to 500 miles, making it the first point of communication with ships sailing to North America.

And it also reported the Austrian government’s July 23 ultimatum to Serbia (then usually spelled Servia) in the wake of the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand.  Another report in the same paper states that Germany and Italy support the Austro-Hungarian action, and that many believed that war was inevitable.

Europe was now days away from war.

Samuel J. Woolf, First Aid Station at Seicheprey, oil, 1919 at Google Books

A hundred years ago, on June 28, 1914, Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his consort were assasinated in Sarajevo, Bosnia, as reported here in the next day’s edition of the New York Tribune.

That morning, as the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne made his way to city hall, a bomb had been thrown at his entourage. The papers reported that he was indignant upon his arrival at city hall, and snapped, “Herr burgemaster, we come to pay you a visit and bombs are thrown at us. It is an insult!”

After the ceremonies had been concluded at city hall, the Archduke and Duchess announced that they would go to the hospital to visit the wounded members of their party. Despite being under the protection of a cordon of police, they made a wrong turn down a street where the young Gavrilo Princip seized the opportunity and fired the fatal shots upon the Archduke and Duchess.

Later reports, such as the Washington Times for July 1, 1914, revealed that scores of bombs had been awaiting the royals, and that the Archduke “had not one chance in a hundred to escape the Bosnian conspirators.” The Times also correctly reported that “war is near.”

The assassination did indeed serve as the spark that ignited the First World War. Austria-Hungary had annexed Bosnia in 1908. While residents of Vienna paid surprisingly little attention to the assassination, it did spark a massive crackdown against Serbs in Sarajevo, as well as massive riots. The evening of the assassination, the mayor of Sarajevo issued a proclamation denouncing the crime, and announcing that there was no doubt that the bomb came from Belgrade. Anti-Serbian protests, as well as a virtual pogrom against the Serbs, followed.

Austria-Hungary also assumed (correctly, it turns out) that Serbia had been responsible for the assassination, and delivered an ultimatum to Serbia. When Serbia failed to comply, Austria-Hungary declared war on July 28. Russia and Germany quickly mobilized their forces, and in response, Germany delivered an ultimatum to Russia to demobilize. When this ultimatum went unheeded, Germany then declared war against Russia on August 1. When France did not adequately comply with German demands for neutrality, Germany declared war on France on August 3, followed by a declaration of war against Belgium on August 4. In response, Britain declared war against Germany on August 4.

Wireless and other technologies were to play an important role in the course of that war, and we’ll be seeing many such examples here as we look back at the centennial of the Great War. The various ultimata and declarations seem to have been delivered successfully using normal diplomatic channels, and wireless seems to have played little role in the start of the war.

It is interesting to note, however, how Austria-Hungary had used technology as part of its unsuccessful attempt to incorporate Bosnia into its empire. The journal Electrical Engineering, January, 1914, reports the successful completion of the Vienna-Sarajevo telephone circuit: “Satisfactory telephonic communication has recently been established between Vienna and Sarajevo, a distance of 875 miles.” Presumably, that line was cut in the coming months, and one press account notes that in reaction to the assassination, all telephone and telegraph facilities in Sarajevo were shut off to all but official communications.

The world would soon be at war, and wireless was to play a role.