Local Color by Irvin S. Cobb

This war, which started with the assassination of an archduke and his archduchess -- a thing we are apt to forget about in the face of a tragedy a billion-fold greater -- this war, which started thus and so, already has touched or is touching or yet will touch, at some angle and in some fashion, every one of us in every corner of the world. Some it has touched indirectly, by the oblique. Upon others, who are as numberless now as the sands on the shore, it has come with such brutal emphasis that it must seem to them -- such of them as survive -- that the whole incredible business was devised and set afoot for the one and the sole purpose of levelling them, their lives and their own small personal affairs in the bloodied red mire of this thing.

For example, let us take the case of Paul Gaston Michel Misereux, his orphaned sister Marie and his orphaned half-sister Helene. In the summer of 1914 they lived in a three-room flat in a five-story tenement house in East Thirteenth Street in New York, not far from the East River.