Today -100: October 5, 1914: Of red eagles, aloof Romania, peace prize winners, and fires in crowded theaters

Kaiser Wilhelm supposedly offers to award the Order of the Red Eagle (second class) to the first aviator who drops explosives on London, with lesser prizes to those who bomb other cities or battleships.

Essad Pasha arrives in Albania’s then capital Durrës with a small army, so he’s probably totally the king now.  Or the puppet of Serbia and Italy, as the case may be.  He’ll take what he can get.

Aloof Headline of the Day -100:  “Rumania to Hold Aloof.”  Won’t enter the war just yet.  There are reports that Bulgaria and Turkey have agreed to attack Romania if it does enter the war, and to divide up large slices of Romanian and Serbian territory (Romania and Serbia both gained a lot of territory in the Balkan Wars).

France says the German story about wounded German soldiers having their noses and ears cut off is a fabrication to distract from their ruthless destruction of Orchies.

Headline of the Day -100:  “Peace Leader Urges a War to the Finish.”  French senator Baron Paul-Henri-Benjamin d’Estournelles de Constant, winner of the 1909 Nobel Peace Prize for his work at the Hague peace conferences, wants Prussian militarism crushed, crushed I tell you!

Yesterday was Sunday, the day for the prayers for peace Pres. Wilson called for.  At St Patrick’s in New York, Cardinal Farley sort of prays for peace, which he says can only come if Christianity triumphs.  The only real cause of this war, he says, was the neglect of the Church and of Christianity by the nations of Europe.  “Almost every nation in Europe was persecuting the Church, trampling on its rights, driving it into the corners of the land.  And now they are paying the penalty.  They are suffering for their sins against God.”  Especially France.

He seems nice.

The NY state fire marshal bans the use of explosives in movies, because they might start fires in theaters.  Wait, what?  Well evidently they were creating sound effects in movie theaters synched to the film (war scenes being popular just now).  Yes, I could see how that might start a fire.

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