Today -100: April 28, 1915: His hour of disgrace

The US asks Turkey to please stop massacring Armenians.

The British War Office is asking the women of Britain to make gas masks for the soldiers. Well, gauze things more like the face masks you might wear to protect against smog in downtown Beijing, which should be totally effective against chlorine gas. (Actually, worse: when dry, the cotton was just useless; when wet, the user couldn’t breathe at all.)

The British say their troops at Gallipoli are “thoroughly making good their footing”. The Turks say they’ve been beaten back to the coast.

The NYT piles on the First Lord of the Admiralty for the mistakes of the Dardanelles campaign: “Now Winston Churchill’s hour of disgrace has come.” But really it’s more the fault of Asquith for allowing him to keep the job after war began: “For nine disastrous months he has been trying to do work for which neither his training nor his temperament fits him.”

Germany plans to purchase food enough for four more years of war.

The governor of Georgia is receiving thousands of letters calling for Leo Frank’s sentence to be commuted.

Margaret Buckner Lytle files for divorce from William Lytle, a black dentist in Oakland, California she married seven years ago under the mistaken belief that she was also a negro. She was raised in a convent and didn’t know her parents but a recent blood test has proved that she is white. So she wants a divorce. Or an annulment since inter-racial marriages aren’t legal.

The pianist & composer Alexander Nikolayevich Scriabin dies, at 43. From blood poisoning. Because he scratched a pimple. So don’t do that.

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