Today -100: July 18, 1918: Of best deaths, sawed-off shotguns, useless wars, amusing shells, and red hats

Lt. Quentin Roosevelt, son of the former president, is killed in aerial battle. He was 21. “The best of deaths,” the NYT calls it.

German newspapers are complaining over rumors that American troops have been issued sawed-off shotguns, which are apparently not “honorable,” presumably because no one’s bothered to train them to shoot. What next, they ask, tomahawks and scalping knives?

Headline of the Day -100: 

Oh, NOW he tells us.  Austrian Foreign Minister Count Burian says “we regard this war as senseless and purposeless bloodshed which might at any moment be ended by the re-emergence of feelings of humanity in our enemies.”

Headline of the Day -100:  

Émile-Joseph Duval, the manager of the newspaper Le Bonnet Rouge, is executed for allegedly taking money from Germany to publish defeatism. Another person associated with the paper, also arrested in 1917, the photographer Miguel Almereyda, the father of the great film-maker Jean Vigo, was mysteriously strangled in prison.

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