By Richard van Pelt, WWI Correspondent

“Russia Will Not Permit Austria to Oppress Serbians”read the headline. The Balkans came to be called the tinderbox of war. A tinderbox was a small container containing flint, steel, and tinder and used together to help kindle a fire before the invention of matches. For most of the decade preceding the outbreak of World War I, the Balkans was an unstable region that had once been part of the Ottoman Empire, and was now contested by emerging nationalities, Russia, and Austria-Hungary.

The Journal continued to report that the assassination the archduke eliminated from stage a “dangerous man.”Serbia was effectively a client state of Russia and would, during the coming weeks, take its lead from Russia. Austria-Hungary as well, calibrated its response to the assassination in terms of the extent to which she would be supported by Germany.

Revolution in Mexico continued to be closely monitored. “There was no longer any question today that a bad break had occurred between Generals Carranza and Villa,”the paper reported, adding that “Villa had stopped fighting and said he would not begin again until he had an understanding with Carranza.”The Revolution began in 1910, as an uprising against Porfirio Díaz. It would las until 1920. The revolution devolved into a complex civil war driven by the varying personalities involved in the struggle.

“Hundreds Killed When Turks and Servians Fight.”reported the headline. “More than 200 were killed and wounded today at Mostar, Herzegovina province, in fighting between Servians and Mohammedan Croats.”Flash forward to 1993 and the history repeats itself. The tinder that sparked World War I remained dry and ready to flash into war eighty years after 1914.

In a satirical comment on the power of corporations, in an editorial titled “Stop, Look, Listen!”the reader is reminded of the need to be careful when crossing the railroad and to not be “suddenly projected into another world with all their imperfections on their heads.”The editor is outraged at a suit by the Erie railroad against a man who got in the way of one of its trains and the costs the railroad must assume “to pick up all the fragments of a wagon and the pieces of horse scattered along the railroad and make everything look as trim and neat as it did before.”Inasmuch as “gross earnings are running down,”the editor writes, “and the costs of cleaning up after a crossing wreck are becoming serious,”the railroad sued a man who got in the way of one of its trains.”“The company grudges the expose, with business as poor as it is, and is trying to get $100 out of the miscreant, who has been in a hospital for three months as a result of trying to run down one of its trains. He had three ribs broken and received other injuries, and want $25,000 damages, but the railroad company says he owes it $100 for spoiled pain and a couple of broken slats in a cow catcher.”“Don’t try to knock a train off the track,”the editor says somewhat tongue in cheek.