Outbreak of World War I
The first information of the war reached Kalisz when the nearby border with the German Empire was closed at Nowe Skalmierzyce and train movement across the border to Germany was stopped. Russian officials started evacuating the city alongside military personnel. On August 2, 1914, at dawn, the Russian military retreated from the city without fighting, after setting fire to military warehouses near the railway station. The railway station was set afire as well as the trains and transport wagons. A civic committee was established by the citizens of the town which started administrating the city. Additionally, the Civil Guard was established to keep order in the city, while railway workers tried to put down the fire at the railway station.
Read more about this topic: Destruction Of Kalisz
Famous quotes containing the words war i, world and/or war:
“War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things: the decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks nothing worth a war, is worse.... A war to protect other human beings against tyrannical injustice; a war to give victory to their own ideas of right and good, and which is their own war, carried on for an honest purpose by their own free choice—is often the means of their regeneration.”
—John Stuart Mill (1806–1873)
“O world invisible, we view thee, O world intangible, we touch thee, O world unknowable, we know thee, Inapprehensible, we clutch thee!”
—Francis Thompson (1859–1907)
“Borrowers are nearly always ill-spenders, and it is with lent money that all evil is mainly done and all unjust war protracted.”
—John Ruskin (1819–1900)